Book Launch: 'Remaking the Readymade: Duchamp, Man Ray, and the Conundrum of the Replica'

By Adina Kamien-Kazhdan, The Israel Museum
4 October 2018
Prahlad Bubbar Gallery, Mayfair

‘Early in his artistic career, Duchamp had progressed from working in a mechanical artistic language to the conception of the readymade. The next logical step toward his goal to “dehumanize” works of art was the replication of the readymades. On the other hand, the limited edition replicas are highly retinal and aesthetic entities produced using traditional methods. Rather than look for similar objects, Schwarz and Duchamp decided to remake the readymade. For the seven readymades that had been lost, Schwarz commissioned a professional draftsman in Milan to prepare technical drawings of the readymades from enlargements of old photographs of each.’ Adina Kamien-Kazhdan

Dr. Adina Kamien-Kazhdan is Senior Curator of Modern Art at The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, and lecturer in modern art and curating at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. She has curated numerous exhibitions and authored catalogues and articles on Dada and surrealism, Duchamp, Man Ray, Miro, among others. Curator in charge of the Vera and Arturo Schwarz Collection of Dada and Surrealist Art, her book “Duchamp, Man Ray, and the Conundrum of the Replica” was published by Routledge in 2018. Adina’s recent exhibition No Place Like Home focused on the transformed domestic object returned to a quasi-home within the museum, and her next exhibition on replication from Rome to the digital age is scheduled for 2020.

Earned BA in Psychology and General BA from Hebrew University. MA in Clinical Psychology and Art History from Hebrew University. PhD in Art History and Theory from the Centre for the Study of Surrealism and its Legacies, University of Essex/Manchester/Tate, England.