Marcel Duchamp reached the center of the art world, announced he was done, and spent decades playing chess, all while secretly building one final masterpiece in a Greenwich Village apartment. This episode traces the French-American provocateur from a family of artists, where he skipped academy classes to play billiards and learned typography during military service, to the 1912 rejection of his nude descending a staircase by the Cubists, which convinced him that every movement eventually becomes its own establishment.

We follow his library job, his reading of Poincaré, the airplane propeller that made him declare painting washed up, his arrival in New York in 1915 as an Armory Show celebrity, and the readymades chosen for pure visual indifference. The conversation covers the urinal signed R. Mutt submitted to a supposedly no-jury show in 19 ...