Bicycle Wheel, 1913/1964

The bicycle wheel is attached to its fork and fastened to a kitchen stool. When Duchamp traveled to New York in 1915, he left the work in Paris and it was lost when his sister, Suzanne, cleaned his studio. In 1916, Duchamp made a replica of Bicycle Wheel in a New York studio and this version was documented in a photograph. Over the years, Duchamp created 14 readymades, but only seven survived through 1960. The rest were lost between apartment moves and Duchamp's wanderings among various countries.

Duchamp donated five original readymades to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and two to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1964, with the assistance of gallery owner and art collector Arturo Schwarz, Duchamp created a series of replicas of his readymade work, in editions of about ten copies, and these were distributed between the artist, the publisher and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In 1972, Schwarz donated one edition to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and these are the works displayed in the exhibition. Duchamp and Schwarz reproduced Bicycle Wheel according to the photograph from Duchamp's studio in New York in 1916, which, as noted, was also not the original work.