Kunsthaus Zürich presents the world's first Suzanne Duchamp retrospective
Suzanne Duchamp. Installation view Kunsthaus Zürich, 2025. Photo: Franca Candrian, Kunsthaus Zürich. Works: © Suzanne Duchamp / 2025, ProLitteris, Zurich.
ZURICH.—
The Kunsthaus Zürich is staging the first comprehensive retrospective devoted to Suzanne Duchamp. Her interweaving of suggestive picture titles such as ‘Factory of my Thoughts’ with graphically striking yet minimalist compositions has entered art history yet remains inspirational to this day. Nevertheless, despite belonging to one of the most famous artist families, she has until now been largely unknown to a wider audience. The exhibition, which includes exceptional loans from renowned public and private collections, finally gives Duchamp the prominence she deserves.
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The Dadaist and painter Suzanne Duchamp (1889, Blainville-Crevon – 1963, Neuilly sur-Seine) left behind a multifaceted oeuvre which features in prestigious collections but is primarily appreciated by connoisseurs. She was strongly involved with the avant-garde movements of her time and contributed with her own particular mark to art history. The sister of Marcel Duchamp, Raymond Duchamp-Villon and Jacques Villon, she was in close exchange with her siblings. In 1919, she married the Swiss artist Jean Crotti, with whom she recurrently worked together, and from whom some key works are held by the Kunsthaus Zürich. The last significant exhibition on the couple was at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1983, in association with the Kunsthalle Bern. The time is ripe, then, to honour Suzanne Duchamp’s work in greater depth. Her pictorial language is subtle, humorous and aesthetic – a rather unusual combination in Dada. And what better place than Zurich, the birthplace of Dada in 1916, to grant this exceptional artist the attention she merits.
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BOTH ABSTRACT AND FIGURATIVE
Duchamp explored multiple avenues in her art. Fascinated by Cubism, she analysed the fragmentation of domestic interiors and urban landscapes before turning to Dada. Her works blend painting with poetry and experiment with a variety of media and materials.
While in the 1910s her painting evolved increasingly towards abstraction, she always remained attached to visual points of reference, reinforcing them through the use of enigmatic titles. In 1922, for unknown reasons, she abruptly broke with Dada and switched to a figurative form of painting, often with ironic undertones and naif forms. In the decades that followed, she created works employing a wide range of motifs, revealing an experimental approach to pigments and drawing as a structuring element. In 1949, her influential friend Katherine S. Dreier described her as a ‘semi abstract artist’, an apt description of an oeuvre that refuses to comply with any art historical convention.
EXHIBITION INCLUDING THE LATEST RESEARCH FINDINGS
The retrospective brings Duchamp’s Dada works together with earlier and later periods of her artistic career. Guest curator Talia Kwartler spent many years researching Duchamp in depth and wrote her PhD dissertation on the artist at University College London. In 2024, Kwartler was appointed to conduct a seminar at the University of Zurich on women in the Dada movement. Thanks to her involvement, she and Kunsthaus curator and Dada expert Cathérine Hug have expanded the planned presentation into a unique retrospective, the first devoted to this artist. It falls within a long tradition of Dada presentations at the Kunsthaus Zürich since 1966, and can be seen as a milestone in art history research. With some 50 paintings, 20 works on paper and rare archive materials along with vintage photographs, it offers up a broad spectrum of Duchamp’s work. Many pieces have only been rediscovered thanks to intensive research and are exhibited for the first time. The lenders include institutions such as MoMA in New York, the Philadelphia Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet in Paris, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen, as well as significant private collections such as the Bluff Collection and the Collection Francis M. Naumann and Marie T. Keller. The exhibition was also developed under the supervision of the Association Duchamp Villon Crotti.
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