"In Advance of the Broken Armr"

Marcel Duchamp - Oil
In advance of the broken arm (1915) Snow shovel on which he carefully painted its title. The first piece the artist called a "readymade." New to America, Duchamp had never seen a snow shovel not manufactured in France. With fellow Frenchman Jean Crotti he purchased it from a stack of them, took it to their shared studio, painted the title and "from Marcel Duchamp 1915" on it, and hung it from a wire in the studio. Many years later, a replica of the piece is said to have been mistaken for an ordinary snow shovel and used to move snow off the sidewalks of Chicago.