CHAPEL HILL, NC.- The Ackland Art Museum at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill announced today that it has acquired what is widely considered to be a masterpiece of twentieth-century art by Marcel Duchamp. One of the seminal artists of the period and a contemporary of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, Duchamp (1887-1968) decisively affected the most radical and conceptual tendencies in art of his time, offering pointed, witty, and enigmatic critiques of visual representation, the status of the work of art, the role of creativity, and the place of art institutions.

The newly-acquired work of art by Duchamp, entitled From or by Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Sélavy, is a so-called “boîte” (box) containing 80 meticulously crafted, small-scale reproductions of the artist’s works. These range from his avant-garde paintings, such as the famous Nude Descending a Staircase which scandalized the New York art world at the Armory Show in 1913, to his provocative “ready-mades,” including the 1917 Fountain, an inverted urinal signed with the pseudonym “R. Mutt.” This exhibition has been made possible by the Ackland National Advisory Board.

Marcel Duchamp worked on preparing these miniature reproductions in France in the years around the outbreak of World War II. He then smuggled them out of occupied Paris when he immigrated to the United States in 1942.

Envisioned by the artist as “a box in which all my works would be collected and mounted like a small museum, a portable museum, so to speak,” Duchamp issued more than 300 of these custom-built boxes―in seven series with slight variations―between 1941 and 1968. The first series incorporated a leather carrying case, hence the common title “boîte-en-valise.” The Ackland’s box is a virtually pristine example from the sixth series, an edition of 75 created in 1966.

Marcel Duchamp, French, 1887-1968: From or By Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Sélavy, 1966; mixed-media assemblage: red leather box containing miniature replicas, photographs, and color reproductions of eighty works by Marcel Duchamp. Ackland Art Museum, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Ackland Fund, 2014.37. © Succession Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2015.“Much of contemporary art makes no sense without acknowledging and experiencing the foundational role of Marcel Duchamp,” commented Peter Nisbet, the Ackland Art Museum’s chief curator and interim director. “We are thrilled to add this essential dimension to the Ackland’s collection with this very significant acquisition, a work that literally encapsulates virtually an entire oeuvre by a true master of modern art.”

The work is on view from 24 April through 7 June 2015, as part of the Ackland’s Adding to the Mix exhibition series. Since 2011, Adding to the Mix shows have presented recent acquisitions in the context of resonant works already in the Ackland’s collection. In this case, the context is provided by the Ackland’s entire surrounding installation of the “Western Tradition” of painting and sculpture which Duchamp so effectively challenged and subverted.