Box in a Valise (Boite-en-valise), series F

One of the most influential artists of the 20th century, Marcel Duchamp is best known for his “readymades,” works of sculpture that consist of everyday objects—a bottle drying rack, bicycle wheel, shovel, and urinal, among others—displayed as-is or with minimal intervention. Seemingly simple and even tongue-in-cheek, Duchamp’s readymades in fact pressed on some of art history’s major philosophical issues: they questioned distinctions between art and non-art, and proposed that an artist could elevate an ordinary thing to the status of art by selecting it from the store and placing it in an exhibition context.

First produced in 1941 and released in various iterations thereafter, Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise (Box in a Suitcase) is a miniature museum of small-scale replicas of his ready-mades, paintings, drawings, and sculptures. Boîte is full of contradictions that play up the issues of reproduction and originality at the center of Duchamp’s oeuvre. Art historian Martha Buskirk points out that, unlike the works on which they are based, the objects in Boîte are “decidedly not mass-produced,” most of them created instead through “a much more elaborate, careful, and labor-intensive process.” She adds, “Paradoxically, given the assumption that one effect of mechanical reproduction is to bring the work of art to the viewer,” Duchamp had to travel to see many of the works in person, and even had to repurchase one of them in order to have it to reproduce.