Francis M. Naumann

Francis M. Naumann is a scholar, curator, art historian and former art dealer specializing in the Dada and Surrealist periods. He has written numerous articles, books, and exhibition catalogues, including New York Dada 1915-23 (1994), considered the definitive history of the movement. He is author of Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1999), co-author of Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Chess (2009), and Affectionately, Marcel: The Selected Correspondance of Marcel Duchamp (2000). His collected writings on Duchamp were published as The Recurrent, Haunting Ghost: Essays on the Art, Life and Legacy of Marcel Duchamp (2012).

June 2025ArtSeen

Francis Picabia: Eternal Beginning

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Francis M. Naumann reviews Francis Picabia: Eternal Beginning at Hauser & Wirth. Organized in collaboration with Comité Picabia, it is the first major exhibition to focus on the artist’s final years. 

Installation view: Francis Picabia: Eternal Beginning, Hauser & Wirth, New York, 2025. © 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer.

May 2025Books

Susan Polgar’s Rebel Queen

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Susan Polgar learned to play chess at the age of four. She found a board and its pieces in the closet of the home in which she lived with her parents in Budapest, Hungary, and thought they were toys. When her father came home, he taught her how to play the game and, within a few months, she began beating nearly everyone she played (including her father). Within a year, she even entered a tournament and played with children three to four times her age and—while still only four years old—beat them all.

Susan Polgar’s Rebel Queen

July/August 2024In Memoriam

Martica Sawin

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Art historian and critic Martica Sawin—who died in Portland, Maine, on June 8, 2024 at the age of 95—worked tirelessly for decades behind the scenes to promote the work of artists she felt were talented but overlooked.
Martica Sawin

March 2023Books

Hugh Eakin’s Picasso’s War: How Modern Art Came to America

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The title of this book—Picasso's War: How Modern Art Came to America—is a misnomer, because it implies that the struggle to bring modern art to America was Picasso’s. But as this book demonstrates more poignantly than perhaps any other, the artist did virtually nothing himself to promote or in other ways encourage the advancement of his work in the United States. In fact, he was at best indifferent.
Hugh Eakin’s Picasso’s War: How Modern Art Came to America

October 2022Critics Page

First Encounters with Marcel Duchamp

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My first comprehension of a readymade was so momentous and life-altering that it is etched into my memory with such permanence that it seems to have happened yesterday, when, in actual fact, it occurred when I was eighteen years old, now some fifty-eight years ago.
Francis Naumann. Pencil on paper by Phong H. Bui

April 2022Books

Lit de Marcel

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For those interested in the private life of Marcel Duchamp, Ruth Brandon’s Spellbound by Marcel: Duchamp, Love and Art, might come as a welcomed contribution to the extant literature on the artist. Although we already knew something about this subject—thanks, in part, to the definitive biography on the artist by Calvin Tomkins (from which this book draws heavily)—this is the first time an author has carefully read the unpublished diaries of Duchamp’s two closest friends during his early years in New York.
Lit de Marcel

October 2021Art

Pure Meshuggah: Anti-Semitism Invades Art History

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In my four decades working in New York as an art historian, teacher and art dealer, I never imagined that racist politics and white supremacist viewpoints could contaminate my profession.
Marcel Duchamp, Bicycle Wheel, 1950 (replica of work from 1913 made by Sidney Janis). Bicycle fork and rim turned upside down and mounted into a kitchen stool, 50 1/2 x 25 1/2 inches. Museum of Modern Art, New York; Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection. © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2021.

October 2015Critics Page

The Papers Chase

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In 1979, I learned that the archives of author Henri-Pierre Roché (1879 – 1959) were in the collection of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center (HRC) at the University of Texas at Austin.

September 2013Critics Page

What is Art?

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The notion of what constitutes a work of art is as old as the concept of art itself. We were under the impression that we had it all figured out until the early years of the 20th century, when, adopting a pseudonym, a 29-year-old French artist submitted a commercially manufactured object to an art exhibition in New York and forced us to ask the question all over again.

November 2012Art

Marcel Duchamp Slept Here

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During the winter of 2008 – 2009, the city of Buenos Aires hosted the first exhibition devoted to Marcel Duchamp held in Argentina, meant, essentially, to commemorate the artist’s nine-month sojourn there in 1918 – 19.
The Barerstrasse in Munich, ca. 1910 (the building in which Duchamp rented a room--no. 65--is just hidden from view on the right).

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