An expansive online research portal centered on the life and work of the artist Marcel Duchamp has been launched, giving the at-home investigators and Cubism-curious free access to more than 18,000 documents and around 50,000 images. The initiative is the result of a seven-year collaboration between three institutions, one American and two French, the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), the Association Marcel Duchamp (AMD), and Paris’s Centre Pompidou.
Among the trove of information in the portal will be the vast Alexina and Marcel Duchamp Papers and Arensberg Archives at the PMA, the archival collections of the AMD, and the André Breton and Constantin Brancusi collections at the Centre Pompidou. There will also be items from the major Duchamp retrospective exhibitions held in Philadelphia in 1973 and at the Centre Pompidou in 1977 and materials linked to the development and installation of the artist’s final major work, Étant donnés 1° la chute d’eau, 2° le gaz d’éclairage (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas) (1946-66), at the PMA.