Marcel Duchamp
Frederick Kiesler
American, born Austria-Hungary. 1890–1965
1947
A tall, assembled pencil-on-paper drawing mounted in a stepped wooden frame, where the artist composes a spare, life-size standing profile across eight separate sheets to form a single elongated figure.
You first register the warm, boxlike wood, then the pale rectangles whose seams interrupt a faint, almost ghostly linear figure—its delicate contours and surrounding negative space reading as both portrait and architectural relief.
By making the frame an integral part of the composition and fragmenting the image across multiple sheets, the work helps blur the line between drawing, object, and installation, anticipating mid‑century explorations of seriality and display.
Medium
Pencil on eight pieces of paper in wood frame
Dimensions
Frame dims: 89 5/8" x 39 1/8" x 12 7/8"
Classification
Department
Credit
Gift of the D.S. and R.H. Gottesman Foundation
Accession
106.1963.a-i
Palette
Art Terms
Exhibitions
