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Artist, anti-artist, joker, trickster, shape-shifter: Marcel Duchamp broke with tradition and pushed the avant-garde decisively forward. When his work exploded like an art bomb in New York in the 1910s, American art was still mired in the nineteenth century.

Duchamp, bored with tradition, reimagined what art could be, what it was for, and how it might be made—hanging a snow shovel from the ceiling, inverting a urinal, “painting” with dust and bits of string between panes of glass, and reducing his entire oeuvre into a briefcase of miniatures. In his new book, Duchamp Takes New York, author John Strausbaugh traces this bold, playful energy, showing how the city inspired and staged Duchamp’s avant-garde experiments.

John Strausbaugh, a longtime chronicler of the city (in books such as The Village, City of Sedition, and Victory City), puts New York at the center of Duchamp’s story. Fleeing the comforts of French bourgeois life—“wives, three children, a country house, three cars!”— Duchamp found New York instantly liberating. It was here that he produced much of his most radical work and eventually settled for good, once declaring, “New York itself is a complete work of art.” Duchamp’s art simply can’t be pinned down without first recognizing his relationship to New York.