Marcel Duchamp was born in a small town in Normandy, France, but moved to Paris in 1904 to study art at the Académie Julian. Even in those early days Duchamp had radical opinions; he hosted regular discussions with the Cubist artists Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, and Alexander Archipenko. By the end of W.W. I he’d rejected work by contemporaries such as Henri Matisse, calling their art “retinal,” which meant it only pleased the eye. Duchamp thought art should be about the mind. This led him to the question: What is art? For the first time, works from Duchamp’s influential career, from 1911 until his death in 1968, are on view at his friend and patron’s foundation. —Elena Clavarino