Focusing on the world-renowned Duchamp collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Essential Duchamp tells the artist´s story through four key periods. The book begins with his early paintings and engagement with the avant-garde, then charts his abandonment of painting and invention of the readymade. This is followed by the creation of his alter ego Rrose Selavy and the optical experiments of the interwar years, and, finally, by the making of Etant donnes (1946-66), the project that occupied the artist in the final two decades of his life. Shorter accompanying texts include explanations of key terms Duchamp used for his innovative ideas-readymade, precision optics, pictorial nominalism, and infrathin-as well as interviews and statements by the artist about his own art and ideas.