Nude Descending a Staircase II, 1912 Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968)

We create our paintings with museum quality and covering the highest academic standards. Once we get your order, it will be entirely hand-painted with oil on canvas. All the materials we use are the highest level, being totally artist graded painting materials and linen canvas.

We will add 1.6" (4 cm) additional blank canvas all over the painting for stretching.

High quality and detailing in every inch are time consuming. The reproduction of Marcel Duchamp also needs time to dry in order to be completely ready for shipping, as this is crucial to not be damaged during transportation.
Based on the size, level of detail and complexity we need 8-9 weeks to complete the process.

In case the delivery date needs to be extended in time, or we are overloaded with requests, there will be an email sent to you sharing the new timelines of production and delivery.

TOPofART wants to remind you to keep patient, in order to get you the highest quality, being our mission to fulfill your expectations.

We not stretch and frame our oil paintings due to several reasons:
Painting reproduction is a high quality expensive product, which we cannot risk to damage by sending it being stretched.
Also, there are postal restrictions, regarding the size of the shipment.
Additionally, due to the dimensions of the stretched canvas, the shipment price may exceed the price of the product itself.

You can stretch and frame your painting in your local frame-shop.

Once the painting Nude Descending a Staircase II is ready and dry, it will be shipped to your delivery address. The canvas will be rolled-up in a secure postal tube.

We offer free shipping as well as paid express transportation services.

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The paintings we create are only of museum quality. Our academy graduated artists will never allow a compromise in the quality and detail of the ordered painting. TOPofART do not work, and will never allow ourselves to work with low quality studios from the Far East. We are based in Europe, and quality is our highest priority.

At first sight the canvas presents a cascade of ochre, umber and grey planes that fuse and fracture into the semblance of a human figure in transit. Limbs register as rhythmic arcs, a sequence of incremental gestures caught mid‑action. The torso inclines, knees flex, arms swing, yet no single fragment dominates; the eye is obliged to travel with the contour of the body as it negotiates a steep, almost claustrophobic stairwell compressed into angular pockets of shadow.

The chromatic restraint is calculated. Instead of the blush and bloom of flesh, Duchamp offers a spectrum that hovers between sepia photograph and mechanical blueprint. Beige‑greys soften into smoky olive, while sombre browns secure the interstices where forms intersect. Occasional flashes of near‑white read like sparks on a kinetoscope, punctuation that both activates the motion and gently pries the figure from its environment. The palette, by subduing allure, stresses analysis: heat gives way to intellect.

Technique reinforces this cerebral coolness. Paint is applied thinly, its edges defined by draughtsman‑like contours that recall graphite more than hog‑bristle. The surface remains almost matte, eschewing the sensual glamour of impasto for a measured clarity. Echoes of chronophotography—Muybridge translated into oil—linger in the serial repetition of limbs, yet feathered strokes at joints confess an awareness of pliant flesh beneath the schematic. The result is a tension between the empirical and the visceral.

Compositionally, the painting is propelled by a dominant diagonal that sweeps from upper left to lower right, a visual fulcrum around which subordinate shards pivot. Vertical slivers suggest balustrades; horizontal facets intimate stair treads; the dark wedges of negative space provide crucial pauses, preventing the cascade from collapsing into visual noise. At the canvas’s lower margin, the stencilled title functions as both anchor and provocation, inserting language as an explicit compositional element.

Created in 1912, the work occupies an unsettled zone between Cubism’s analytic dissection and Futurism’s cult of velocity. By subjecting the venerable nude to dislocation and speed, Duchamp disturbed academic decorum and alienated his Cubist peers, who balked at showing the picture in Paris. The uproar that greeted its New York debut at the 1913 Armory Show only confirmed its capacity to unsettle. Its layered transparencies anticipate the dematerialisation that would preoccupy later modernism, while its sly defiance foreshadows the conceptual reversals of the artist’s subsequent career.