The Duchamp Research Portal is an online platform that brings together digitized archival holdings and museum collections from partner institutions, providing unified access to a substantial body of primary source materials related to Marcel Duchamp. Developed collaboratively by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Association Marcel Duchamp, and the Centre Pompidou, the Portal makes these resources discoverable through a single, user-friendly interface.
The Portal documents Duchamp’s life and work, with a special focus on the 1969 installation of Étant donnés and the landmark 1973-1974 retrospective jointly organized by the Museum of Modern Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
The Portal builds on the groundwork laid during Anne d’Harnoncourt’s tenure as curator of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Twentieth Century Art Department (1972-1982). Initially a curatorial research effort, the project evolved into a formal collection and was transferred to the Philadelphia Museum of Art Archives as the Marcel Duchamp Research Collection (MDR).
With major funding secured from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2000—thanks in part to d’Harnoncourt’s advocacy—the MDR was processed alongside other key holdings: the Walter and Louise Arensberg Archives (WLA), the Alexina and Marcel Duchamp Papers (MDP), the Marcel Duchamp Exhibition Records (MDE), and the Étant donnés Curatorial Records (EDR).
The Philadelphia Museum of Art received planning and implementation grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities to develop the Portal. During this period, the Association Marcel Duchamp and the Bibliothèque Kandinsky at the Centre Pompidou—now co-founding partners—joined the effort, initiating discussions on the Portal’s structure, research potential, and content scope.
Full-scale development of the Portal included project design, a proof of concept, metadata creation and standardization, digitization of archival materials, and development of the underlying technology and user interface.
The Duchamp Research Portal was officially launched, providing public access to a rich, integrated resource for Duchamp scholarship.
The Portal was made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy demands wisdom, with additional contributions from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, Martha Hamilton Morris and I. Wistar Morris III, The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, The Women’s Committee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and other generous donors.
Note: Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this resource do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The Portal is organized into two main sections: Documents and Museum Collections.
The Documents section features digitized archival materials produced, received, or collected by Marcel Duchamp and his extended network.
The Museum Collections section features images of artworks from the permanent collections of the Portal’s contributing institutions.
The Portal includes nearly 50,000 digitized images accompanied by descriptive metadata. The materials span a wide range of formats, including correspondence, drawings, technical plans, photographs, ephemera, newspaper clippings, scholarly articles, and more.
Note: The Portal does not provide comprehensive access to all Duchamp-related materials held by the participating institutions. Certain materials may be unavailable due to the presence of sensitive or confidential content, incomplete metadata, or the absence of digital surrogates. Additionally, similar materials may appear in multiple collections, thereby creating duplicates within the Portal.
Please visit our GitHub repository to access the Portal’s complete data set and other documentation.
This Portal is administered by the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) and is responsible for publishing and editing all content posted on the Portal. PMA uses cookies to provide and improve services on this Portal. By accessing this Portal, you agree to be bound by PMA’s Terms of Use and Cookie Policy. If you disagree, do not access this Portal.