In late 1911 or early 1912 Marcel Duchamp made a sketch of a nude ascending a staircase. Later, when he began work on the painting for which the sketch was intended, he decided to depict the nude descending the staircase. In that moment the theme of the modern age changed, the myth of progress was exposed and modernism began its long descent into doubt.
In Duchamp’s mind, the nude turned and came down, which normally would suggest a dynamic moment, a moment of entry, the nude muse offering herself to the artist, to the world. But there persists a sense that the height had been attained and everything was downhill from there. The descent had begun.