In​ 1973, when a Marcel Duchamp retrospective was last staged in the United States, the critic Lucy Lippard declared that too much was made of him already. More than fifty years later he is still ubiquitous: we see endless variations on his old theme of the readymade object. The best cure for Duchamp fatigue, though, might be a large dose of the real thing. This is what the curators deliver in the current retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (until 22 August), where the entire sixth floor is given over to three hundred or so works, along with many vitrines filled with facsimiles, notes, documents and ephemera of all sorts, some of which will be new to initiates. Clearly the aim is to exhibit as much as possible, which not only shows off the excellent collections of Duchamp at MoMA and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (where the retrospective will appear next) but also demonstrates the loan power of these institutions.

Duchamp will be familiar to many visitors, and the three curators – Ann Temkin and Michelle Kuo of MoMA and Matthew Affron of the PMA – don’t condescend to them: the wall texts are straightforward. This confidence in the viewer is in keeping with his own emphasis, in a talk in 1957 about ‘the creative act’ of the beholder, on the importance of reception in the fate of any artwork. And our understanding of Duchamp will shift in the wake of this show. In the usual accounts, for instance, he renounced painting when his colleagues refused his submission, the Cubo-Futurist Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) (1912), to the Salon des Indépendants in Paris. But if Duchamp rejected painting, it also rejected him: he was a poor painter, as the first gallery, dotted with splotchy landscapes and unlovely nudes in the manner of Monet and Degas, makes clear. Duchamp began his career with sketches for magazines, and his wan Cubism is more illustrational, in the manner of Roger de La Fresnaye, than analytical as in Picasso and Braque.

Perhaps Duchamp was aware of his own limitations, or maybe he realised that his true interests lay elsewhere, not in ‘retinal’ painting (as he put it dismissively) but in cerebral art: he was primarily an ideas man. In this respect his first invention was the readymade, an everyday commodity presented as an artwork; in 1913 he attached a bicycle wheel on its forks to a wooden stool (he said he liked to watch it spin). Yet this innovation was overshadowed by a more consequential event that same year: included in the Armory Show in New York, which introduced modernist art to the US, Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) was the succès de scandale of the exhibition. Mocked in the press, it made Duchamp a small celebrity; it also suggested a way to think about art strategically rather than stylistically. Both the notoriety and this way of thinking served him well when he sailed to New York in 1915 for an extended stay.

His most notorious readymade, Fountain, appeared in 1917 at a show staged by the Society of Independent Artists, or rather it didn’t appear – we know the original only through a photograph taken by his friend Alfred Stieglitz. Duchamp bought a urinal in a shop, signed it with the pseudonym ‘R. Mutt’, rotated it through ninety degrees and placed it on a pedestal as an artwork (one commentator called it ‘Buddha of the Bathroom’). The exhibition committee, which had pledged to accept all entries, voted to refuse it, and Duchamp resigned in protest: another rejection, another scandal, another triumph. Much later, Duchamp claimed that he had selected his readymades out of ‘visual indifference’, ‘a complete anaesthesia’, but obviously this one was intended, in avant-gardist fashion, to shock. Accused of plagiarism, Duchamp responded, in third-person disguise, that the urinal was art because ‘he CHOSE it’ – a fateful declaration in 20th-century culture. And, charged with immorality, he noted that a urinal was an everyday piece of furniture. Besides, he added, ‘the only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges.’

This tension – between a critique of authorship (anyone can buy a readymade) and an assertion of authority (only an artist can nominate one as art) – wasn’t new to Duchamp. On the way to Fountain he had already challenged conventional ideas of artistry with diagrammatic images like Chocolate Grinder (No. 2) from 1914 (mechanical drawing was taught in lycées to prepare children for industrial manufacture) as well as aleatory pieces like Three Standard Stoppages (1913-14), which consists of three strings a metre long dropped from a metre up in the air and fixed in the shapes in which they landed. Not long after Fountain Duchamp complicated the idea of authorship in another way: he invented a female alter ego called Rrose Sélavy (which, voiced as French, translates as ‘eros, that’s life’), whom he credited with several works thereafter. Here Duchamp implied that sexual difference is always in play in the making of art, and sexual desire in its viewing, which goes against not only the Kantian insistence that aesthetic contemplation be disinterested, but also his own pose of anaesthetic indifference. Duchamp highlighted difference and desire, too, in his 1919 détournement of a reproduction of the Mona Lisa, on which he doodled a moustache and a goatee; its title, L.H.O.O.Q., sounds like the French for ‘she has a hot ass.’

Duchamp focused all these concerns in his first magnum opus, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, also known as The Large Glass, a nine-foot-tall work of two glass panes that he laboured over from 1915 to 1923; his notes for the piece began earlier, and the subject matter stems directly from his Cubo-Futurist paintings. Art historians have devoted entire careers to the exegesis of The Large Glass, which Duchamp declared ‘definitively unfinished’ when it shattered in transit sometime in the late 1920s. Suffice it to say that it comprises two separate zones, one for the bride above, who is evoked by an insectoid form, and one for the bachelors below, who are represented by various mechanisms (Chocolate Grinder is also reproduced here). The bride, who ‘blossoms orgasmically’ in a horizontal row of three pale rectangles, has no need of the bachelors, who grind away onanistically – an allegory in line with the Freudian thesis that desire is born of frustration or lack, which would soon be explored in many Surrealist objects.

Duchamp returned to this idea in Étant donnés, located at the PMA, which he developed in secret between 1946 and 1966 (it was unveiled only after his death in 1968). In the nether reaches of the museum one approaches a large weathered door (which Duchamp had brought over from Spain) with two peepholes through which is revealed a diorama of a headless female mannequin spreadeagled in a landscape illuminated by the gas lamp that she is holding. In this perspectival set-up our viewing point lines up with her vanishing point – her vulva. Duchamp said he wanted to underscore the fact that viewers are always voyeurs; or, as Jean-François Lyotard later put it, ‘Con celui qui voit’ (‘He who sees is a cunt’).

After The Large Glass Duchamp fell silent, or pretended to do so, and turned to chess, in which he soon achieved master status. This was in part a break from art – as Rrose Sélavy he became involved in optical investigations – and in part a redefinition of artmaking as a game of strategic moves. By this time a pattern had emerged in his career, a to-and-fro between public scandal and private project, between abrupt withdrawal from the art world and sudden return to it in another guise. An exile between the wars, mostly in transit between Paris and New York, where he finally settled after the Second World War, Duchamp survived as a sometime agent of his own work and that of good friends like Brâncuși. It makes sense that the next major project for this man on the move was a limited edition of a little suitcase filled with miniature facsimiles of his own previous works. Few people knew what to make of the meticulously crafted La Boîte-en-valise (1935-41); when it was given to MoMA, it was recorded sardonically as ‘Duchamp suitcase Box of tricks’. More astute was a note to Duchamp from his great patron Walter Arensberg: ‘It is a kind of autobiography in a performance of marionettes. You have become the puppeteer of your past.’ Box of tricks and puppet show, Valise is also a mini-museum of a single artist that mocks the very institution it mirrors.

At MoMA the materials of Valise are given a gallery filled with vitrines; they form the crux of the show. This is another shift in the interpretation of Duchamp, away from The Large Glass as the centre of his oeuvre (though it may shift back at the PMA where The Large Glass is a fixture). Indeed, both the exhibition and the catalogue are preoccupied with ‘his direct and deep engagement … with the inherently conservative institution of the museum’, above all MoMA and the PMA. Arensberg gave his Duchamp holdings to the PMA in 1950, while the other great Duchamp patron, Katherine Dreier, donated six of hers to MoMA in 1953. Duchamp negotiated the PMA donation with relative ease, but his relations with MoMA were somewhat strained. He complained of the ‘malicious incompetence’ of its director Alfred Barr, even though Barr had floated the idea of a survey of his work as early as 1936, the same year that MoMA included eleven Duchamp pieces in the landmark show Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism.

After the Second World War, Duchamp was a revered presence in the New York art world, an avuncular adviser in particular to the circle of Cage, Cunningham, Rauschenberg and Johns, who made of his hermetic art a queer code of their own as they worked to establish a neo-avant-garde alternative to the pure painting of Abstract Expressionism. Renewed interest in Duchamp led to an increased demand for his art, especially for the readymades, but they were scarce since he kept the supply tight. Eventually Duchamp agreed to two sets of replicas, the first undertaken by the Swedish curator and critic Ulf Linde in 1960, the second by the Italian dealer and writer Arturo Schwarz in 1964. Though he was less involved in the former set than the latter (which is more precise as a result), Duchamp authorised both – another twist in his long play with authorship and another focus of the curators here. (Because of the chronological layout of the show, the gallery of readymade replicas, some suspended from the ceiling as beautiful objects, comes late, which is a surprise given that the initial versions date from the 1910s.)

Above all, the replicas were needed for the first two Duchamp retrospectives, one at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1963, the other at the Tate Gallery in 1966. The Pasadena opening attracted young Pop artists like Andy Warhol and Ed Ruscha, who claimed Duchamp as a patron saint. Another Pop figure, Richard Hamilton, who accompanied Duchamp to California, devoted a few years to a reconstruction of The Large Glass for the Tate show; he also collaborated on a ‘typotranslation’ of the ‘Green Box’ of notes which Duchamp made while at work on the piece. Duchamp signed the Hamilton reconstruction ‘Pour copie conforme’ (certified genuine copy), continuing the complication of the opposition between original and copy begun with the readymades and deepened with the replicas. (The deconstruction of this opposition is associated with postmodernist art of the 1980s, but it was already at work in the 1960s. All these facsimiles, which start with La Boîte-en-valise, also confused the opposition between industrial production and artisanal craft.) ‘The replicas unsettled the museum,’ the curators write. This is an understatement; many Duchamp devotees (such as Daniel Buren, an artist associated with ‘institutional critique’ in the 1970s) branded them a betrayal. For his part Duchamp remarked, with his usual irony, that the replicas reclaimed for the readymades ‘the freedom of repetition that they had lost’. In the same wry spirit Hamilton commented that Duchamp had allowed ‘his essentially artistic genius’ to ‘defeat him’.

As his critics saw it, Duchamp had succumbed to the marketplace as well as the museum. But did he ever pretend to be outside either? For Duchamp, it seems, there was no alternative to these bourgeois systems, and they didn’t operate in separate spheres anyway. In effect, the museum was his medium (or, as the curators phrase it, his ‘testing ground, foil, partner and, ultimately, home’), and the marketplace his milieu. In an early note for The Large Glass, which alludes cryptically to ‘the interrogation of the shop window’, Duchamp suggests that art objects circulate along with other commodities and trigger a similarly fetishistic desire.

This posture puts the curators in a tricky spot rhetorically, for they need Duchamp to count as avant-garde – that is, as critical if not transgressive. Yet was he? His first biographer, Robert Lebel, called him a ‘born contrarian’, which is weak tea. A bit stronger was the judgment of the painter Robert Motherwell – whose anthology The Dada Painters and Poets (1951) helped to recover such figures for the postwar anglophone world – that Duchamp was a ‘great saboteur’, who ‘[made] sure his work ended up in museums’. This is less a charge of complicity than an acknowledgment of canniness: though Duchamp dissed ‘the art game’, he played it with panache, in large part because he didn’t see any other in town. This tolerant view is in keeping with a revised understanding of institution-critical art from Duchamp to Hans Haacke as a matter less of transgression of both museum and marketplace than negotiation with them, less inevitable recuperation by these systems than limited transformation within them. It is also in line with recent scholarship – The Apparently Marginal Activities of Marcel Duchamp (2016) by Elena Filipovic is the foremost example – that highlights his roles as art adviser, exhibition designer, reproduction maker, publicist and archivist.

Or one can simply see Duchamp as a dandy. Certainly he fits the bill, as detailed by Baudelaire in ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ (1863): his charm was legendary; he had the nonchalance of ‘an out-of-work Hercules’ whose ‘air of coldness’ hid ‘a latent fire’; he enjoyed ‘astonishing others’ while ‘never being astonished’; he played the aristocrat in an age of vulgarisation (he liked to say he was just a respirateur, a breather); and he was amused by his own contradictions (such as the one posed by his readymade replicas) because, well, if you can’t resolve them you may as well enjoy them. The dandy has an important lineage in 20th-century art, but one whose politics is limited to provocation and whose belief in posterity depends on acclaim (or lack thereof). ‘The dead should not be permitted to be so much stronger than the living,’ Duchamp remarked in 1915, a comment weirdly close to Marx (‘Let the dead bury the dead’). Four decades later his view had changed: ‘You should wait for fifty years or a hundred years for your true public. That is the only public that interests me.’

What, then, would Duchamp have made of this exhibition? His retrospectives in the 1960s were almost posthumous; this one seems almost post-posthumous. Which is to say, once more, that he’s still very much with us. His epitaph, one of my favourites, is ‘Besides, it’s always the others who die.’ Long gone, Duchamp lives on.