Lecture: Duchamp's Fountain: A Second Opinion

Bradley Bailey takes the stage at The Barnes on Saturday, November 7, for a talk on Marcel Duchamp's Fountain. It's part of the foundation's Daily Gallery Talks, which run Thursday through Monday, and it sits right in the middle of the city's current Duchamp moment: the Philadelphia Museum of Art is running a retrospective on the artist from October 10, 2026, through January 31, 2027. If you've been following that exhibition, this is a good companion piece.

Bailey is an art historian and Duchamp scholar, an associate professor of art history at Saint Louis University. Much of his research centers on Duchamp's career as a chess player and his invention of the readymade, and he co-authored Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Chess. That's the kind of background that makes a talk like this work—he knows the man and the work from the inside.

The talk re-examines Fountain (1917) and its impact on American modernism. It draws on letters exchanged between the poet William Carlos Williams and the collector and theorist Albert Barnes between September and November 1920. There's a bit of a mystery to the object itself: the original disappeared shortly after the Society of Independent Artists refused to display it in 1917, and it didn't really return to public discussion until the 1950s, when neo-Dada and pop revived interest in the readymade. Bailey's talk looks at that gap and the conversations that happened around it.

It runs from 12 PM to 1 PM in the Roberts Gallery at The Barnes Foundation. Tickets are $10 on-site and $8 online, and it's free for members and students.