The Grand Old Lady of Modern Art: Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase

$19.99 at Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 , one of the best known and immediately recognizable paintings in the history of 20th century art, "is famous," as the critic Robert Hughes astutely observed, "for being famous." Indeed, when it went on display in the celebrated Armory Show of 1913, the painting was so severely attacked and ridiculed by the American press that the criticism itself overwhelmed any aesthetic merit that the painting might have had to offer. The painter, a twenty-six-year-old…