ABOUT THE POEM
Although Nude Descending Staircase No.2 predates the Surrealist movement by more than a decade, I believe it contains the germ of Surrealism.
Even if there is little, superficially, to connect Duchamp’s painting with Dali’s work each artist was in their own way summoning the infinite.
While Dali’s vast landscapes sparsely populated with melting clocks and figures emerging from stone or turning into architectural relics evoke a sense of the futility of time amid the awe and terror of the infinite, Duchamp’s work transforms his nude from a figure more usually reclining into the essence of movement. In counterpoint to Dali, Duchamp splinters time into a fragmenting, and potentially infinite series, of shards. As each shard breaks into ever finer slivers, movement is constricted until time becomes impossible..
But, for me, my first encounter with the Nude collided with that moment on the staircase, catapulting me into the realm of the surreal where the Nude stalks my dreams.