It is difficult to overstate the impact of French-born artist, writer, critic, and thinker Marcel Duchamp on the history of art. While his list of artistic accomplishments is long and varied, he is best known for a gesture first performed in 1914, when he took a mass-produced bottle rack and declared it art. This seemingly simple act—proposing that a shift in context was enough to take something ordinary and transform it into art—broke with centuries of tradition and set the stage for many of the most significant artistic innovations of the past century. Two of Duchamp’s most iconic “readymades,” as he called them, are in Glenstone’s collection: Roue de Bicyclette (Bicycle Wheel), 1913/1964, composed of a bicycle wheel and stool, and Fountain, 1917/1964, a ceramic urinal which the artist signed “R. Mutt.”

–Paul Tukey, from the Glenstone Field Guide