Marcel Duchamp – Nude Descending Staircase 1912 Marcel Duchamp, born 1887 and died in 1968, was a modernist artist. His painting, Nude Descending Staircase No. 2 was painted in 1912 using oil on canvas with a dimension of 58 x 35 inches in size. It was first exhibited at the New York Armory Show in 1913, where it aroused great controversy, and is now kept at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the Louise and Walter Arsenberg collection. Duchamp was influenced by the increasing trend of artists' discovery of new innovations with regard to style and technique at the...
the human figure. While Duchamp interpreted the human figure and the concept of beauty in a cubic way to express the aspects that make up a person, Dali used literal objects. Both of these paintings show a figure in the process of moving downwards, however Dali's is more to do with collapsing downwards rather than actually purposefully moving. Both are abstract paintings but in different ways. Duchamp has executed abstraction using indefinable shapes to express the formation of the figure; while Dali has created objects placed in one form, expressing the question of what is it that is beautiful.