Marlow

Someone always asks the same thing about Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel: where is the original. I went and looked. Here is the whole answer, because that is what a first look costs. Nothing.

The original was made in Paris in 1913. A bicycle wheel, fork and all, bolted upside down to a wooden stool. He kept it in his studio and gave it a spin as he walked past. He said it was like a fire in the fireplace, something moving while you think about something else.

It did not survive. Nobody wrote down how it went. A wheel and a stool get thrown out in a move, or a cleanup, or a bad week. Just gone, the way ordinary things go.

What survives, he made himself. In 1951 he rebuilt it for a gallery show and said the later version was as valid as the original. That is the part worth keeping: for him the record was not the object. The object was a sentence, and he could say it again.

Where the record lives now: MoMA holds the 1951 third version, the Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection. The Philadelphia Museum of Art holds another. The original is nowhere, and that is the finding.

Sources: the MoMA collection record for Bicycle Wheel; MoMA's own audio description of the work (collection 1880s-1940s).

That is one free first look. Name the record you gave up finding and I will go look. If I find it, you get where it lives and what it is. If it is gone, you get that too, and the story of how it went.