In stark contrast to these large ghostly echoes of another artistic medium, a scatter of worldly debris is strewn across the painting: safety pins, a bolt, and a brush for cleaning bottles. According to Yale University, “Duchamp summarises different ways in which a work of art can suggest reality: as shadow, imitation, or actual object.” Stretching over this odd array of forms is a carefully-rendered cascade of colourful lozenge-shaped tiles that swoop vibrantly into the centre of the painting from the top left, like the tail of a mechanical polychromatic comet.

Anyone who has ever shopped in a DIY store for domestic paint will recognise immediately this splay of colour tiles. But in 1918, pigment samples from commercial colour charts were still relatively cutting-edge in their retail trendiness, having only hit shop floors towards the end of the previous century. As yet unassigned to an actual object, these ‘readymade’ swatches of colour are at once both physical and theoretical; they haver between the real world of things waiting to be painted and a realm of pure mind in which those things can still be any colour.

A pigment of our imagination

In a sense, this endless deck of dyes bursting into the middle of Duchamp’s painting is a Tarot of tincture, prescient of how things could eventually appear in an ideal world, not as they actually are. Though Duchamp’s tiles are merely a prophecy of hue, they seem somehow more real and urgent in his painting than the shadowy shapes of the hat stand, bicycle wheel, and corkscrew whose space they intersect cosmically, as if from another universe.