Skip to content
Entertainment
Link copied to clipboard

Throngs queued up to take a peek in '69

When Étant donnés first went on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1969, so many people thronged to see Marcel Duchamp's enigmatic final work that lines unspooled out of the gallery, down the corridor, and, if legend is to believed, on outside the museum.

When

Étant donnés

first went on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1969, so many people thronged to see Marcel Duchamp's enigmatic final work that lines unspooled out of the gallery, down the corridor, and, if legend is to believed, on outside the museum.

Why? Because only one viewer at a time can see the work in its entirety via two small peepholes.

"We actually tripled our attendance that year because of it," said Michael R. Taylor, curator of modern art and of the current Duchamp exhibition. "It was a huge success."

Taylor doubts there will be a repeat of that with the Étant donnés exhibition, because so many other things will be on view, many for the first time. Nevertheless, he said, a museum guard will be available if Duchamp crowd-control becomes necessary.

"If we do start to see a line snaking up through the Brancusi or something, we may have to give people a two-minute warning," Taylor said. "But we're going to play it by ear."

.