Duchamp Takes New York : The Artist Who Upended Modern Art IN PERSON

Duchamp Takes New York

A conversation with writers John Strausbaugh and Kurt Andersen

Tuesday, April 21st at 6.00 P.M.

An In-Person and Online Program

The in-person program will be followed by a Book-signing and Reception.

Best-selling author Kurt Andersen will interview award-winning writer John Strausbaugh about his new book , published to coincide with a major MoMA retrospective (April 12th to August 22nd.) The book revisits the artist who upended modern art, and the city that made it possible.

Artist, anti-artist, trickster, shape-shifter: Marcel Duchamp broke with tradition and pushed the avant-garde decisively forward. When his work exploded like an art bomb in New York in the1910s, American art was still mired in the nineteenth century. Duchamp, bored with tradition, reimagined what art could be, what it was for, and how it might be made. John Strausbaugh and Kurt Andersen will discuss his bold, playful energy, his career, his life and show how the city both inspired and staged his avant-garde experiments.

In this conversation they will examine his considerable influence and explore how Duchamp's offhand gestures reshaped the course of twentieth-century American art, laying the groundwork for nearly every major movement that followed, and reveal his ultimate prank.

John Strausbaugh is an award-winning author, historiographer and journalist. He adds Duchamp Takes New York to a list of books about New York history that include The Village, his epic history of Greenwich Village; City of Sedition, about New York City during the Civil War; and Victory City, about New York during World War II. A former editor and writer for New York Press, he has also written for The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wilson Quarterly and NPR.

Kurt Andersen is the author of the New York Times bestselling histories Evil Geniuses and Fantasyland, as well as the bestselling novels You Can’t Spell America Without Me, True Believers, Heyday, and Turn of the Century. His new novel The Breakup will be published this August. He co-founded Spy magazine, co-created and hosted the Peabody Award-winning public radio show and podcast Studio 360, and hosted and co-produced the podcast Nixon At War. He is also a regular contributor to The New York Times and The Atlantic, and formerly a New Yorker columnist, Time critic and columnist, and New York editor-in-chief.

General Admission: $15; General Society Members and Senior Citizens: $10; Students: $5

Duchamp Takes New York will be available to purchase in-person at the lecture and available

Advance Registration required.

The General Society Library, 20 West 44th Street, New York City, www. generalsociety.org

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