October 09, 2026
Provided images/Philadelphia Museum of Art
South Philly artist Isaiah Zagar cited Marcel Duchamp works like 'The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even' (right) in his mosaics. 'Fountain,' a reproduction of which is on the left, is referenced at Magic Gardens.
The late French artist Marcel Duchamp has surprisingly deep ties to Philadelphia. The city is home to the world's largest collection of his works through the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which stewards some of his most famous pieces and mounted the last major Duchamp retrospective in the U.S. with the Museum of Modern Art over 50 years ago.
Now, those two institutions are reuniting to bring another Duchamp exhibit to America. "Marcel Duchamp," opening Saturday at PMA, is the first robust, stateside survey of the avant-garde artist's work since the museum's 1973 collaboration with MoMA. Visitors to the exhibit may notice yet another link in Duchamp's chain of connections to Philly as they wander through the labyrinth of roughly 300 drawings, paintings and uncategorizable objects — his profound influence on the city's best-known mosaicist.
Isaiah Zagar was known to sneak tributes to artists he admired in between the shards of ceramics and rogue bike wheels that made up his public pieces. According to Philadelphia's Magic Gardens, the museum dedicated to Zagar's work, Duchamp was one of his most-referenced inspirations. This is most apparent in the mosaic that once covered the former Painted Bride Center in Old City. On one side of the building, Zagar cemented the text, "The bride has many suitors, even" — a riff on Duchamp's mixed-media work "The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even."
That painting on glass gets its own room in the PMA exhibit, though that's partially by necessity. The 9-foot-tall piece, also known as "The Large Glass," has been permanently installed at the art museum since 1954; Duchamp himself oversaw the process. But for the new retrospective, it's surrounded by early sketches, on loan from other institutions, that chart the artist's eight years of work on what the museum calls his "magnum opus."
Another section of the exhibit focuses on Duchamp's "readymades," commercial objects that the artist stripped of their function and presented in a new context. They included a bicycle wheel mounted upside down on a stool and a shortened metal birdcage filled with what appear to be sugar cubes, but are actually marble. One of the most famous readymades was "Fountain," a urinal that Duchamp tilted onto its side and signed "R. Mutt" in 1917. Though the original is lost to history, PMA has included multiple reproductions in its latest exhibit. Zagar added his own version to Magic Gardens by salvaging toilet bowls; he, too, considered repurposed materials central to his work.
"Marcel Duchamp" also includes "L.H.O.O.Q.," the artist's cheeky remix of the "Mona Lisa." In this reproduced image, Duchamp gave da Vinci's famous muse a mustache and goatee, and scrawled a rude message along the bottom. (Roughly, it translates to "She's hot in the a--.") Zagar added the text "L.H.O.O.Q." to the swirl of glass and tile above the first window of the former Painted Bride Art Center.
Zagar enthusiasts can sleuth for more references until Jan. 31, when the PMA exhibit closes. But given Duchamp's varied, nearly seven-decade career — with detours into Cubism, Dada and surrealism — the retrospective is likely to attract more than just mosaic fans.
"What I think this exhibition allows us to see, with particular focus, is that this was not pre-planned on (Duchamp's) part," Matthew Affron, the curator of the exhibit, said Thursday. "He did not arrive with a recipe in his pocket about how to change the course of 20th century art, and influence 21st century art.
"He found his way through the making of objects, and through the working with materials, and through the inventing of new ways of fabricating things, and using those new ways of fabricating things to reinvent himself. I really hope that people will focus on that."
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