A bicycle wheel with no tyre, mounted upside down on a painted wooden stool. Marcel Duchamp put the two together in his Paris studio in 1913 for his own amusement, years before he had a word for what he had done. The original is lost, and every example in a museum today is a later version.
Marcel Duchamp joined two manufactured things and did nothing else to them. A bicycle wheel, stripped of its tyre, sits on a four-legged wooden stool. Centre Pompidou describes the object in one line: a bicycle wheel, without a tyre, mounted upside down on a stool.
The phrase upside down is exact. A bicycle fork normally holds its wheel at the bottom and rises to the handlebars. Here Marcel Duchamp turned the fork over, so the wheel rides at the top and the fork's neck runs down into a hole bored through the stool seat. The wheel spins freely in the air at about chest height.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art gives the materials as "Wheel, painted wood" and the size as 128.3 by 63.5 by 31.8 centimetres. Marcel Duchamp carved, cast, painted and joined nothing. The whole of the making was choosing these two objects and fitting one into the other.
Marcel Duchamp assembled the wheel and the stool in his Paris studio in 1913. He did not exhibit it, did not sell it, and did not give it a title at the time. It stood in the room and he watched it turn.
He was explicit afterwards that no theory came first. "Quand j'ai mis une roue de bicyclette sur un tabouret la fourche en bas, il n'y avait aucune idée de readymade ni même de quelque chose d'autre, c'était simplement une distraction." When he put a bicycle wheel on a stool with the fork downwards, he told Pierre Cabanne, there was no idea of a readymade or of anything else; it was simply a distraction.
The pleasure was the movement. Marcel Duchamp compared it to a fire: "To see that wheel turning was very soothing, very comforting, a sort of opening of avenues on other things than material life of every day. I liked the idea of having a bicycle wheel in my studio. I enjoyed looking at it, just as I enjoyed looking at the flames dancing in a fireplace. It was like having a fireplace in my studio."
Marcel Duchamp left France for the United States in August 1915 and left the object behind in Paris. The Museum of Modern Art dates the word "readymade" to the period after that move. The term was his own, coined in New York for the manufactured objects he had begun selecting and presenting as art.
So the name arrived after the object. Marcel Duchamp made the wheel as an amusement, and it was reclassified afterwards as the first example of a category that did not exist when he built it. Tate lists it first among his readymades for that reason, ahead of In Advance of the Broken Arm of 1915 and Fountain of 1917.
The principle he later gave for choosing such objects was deliberately cold. He picked them, he said, "based on a reaction of visual indifference, with at the same time a total absence of good or bad taste". Tate traces that wording to a symposium held at the Museum of Modern Art on 19 October 1961, nearly fifty years after the wheel went onto the stool.
A readymade raises a question a painting does not. The wheel and the stool were designed and built by somebody, and that somebody was not Marcel Duchamp. Both are ordinary commercial products of the period. None of the museums that hold a version names a manufacturer, and no maker's mark is legible in the photograph shown here.
The museums attribute the work to Marcel Duchamp on the strength of the selection and the assembly, not the manufacture. That is the whole claim of the readymade. The design of the wheel belongs to an unrecorded industrial draughtsman. The decision to invert the wheel and drive it into a stool belongs to Marcel Duchamp.
The making of a later version records how little the specific objects mattered to him. The Museum of Modern Art writes that Sidney Janis chose the bicycle wheel while he was in Paris and found the stool in Brooklyn, and that Marcel Duchamp put the wheel and the stool together. In the museum's account, passing on the idea of the readymade mattered more than the object's exact physical appearance.
The 1913 object no longer exists. Centre Pompidou records the loss flatly: the work was created in Paris in 1913 and the original has disappeared. Everything a visitor can stand in front of today was made decades later.
The versions are numbered, and museums use the numbers to keep them straight. The Museum of Modern Art calls its own object the third version, made in New York in 1951 after the lost original of 1913. A second version therefore stood between the 1913 original and the 1951 one. The Museum of Modern Art's copy was built for a 1951 exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York.
The largest group came in 1964. Centre Pompidou records that Marcel Duchamp authorised and signed an edition of eight replicas, assembled by Arturo Schwarz's gallery in Milan. The copy in the Musée national d'art moderne is the sixth of the eight. Its inventory number is AM 1986-286 and it was bought in 1986.
The version reproduced above is the Philadelphia Museum of Art's, and the museum dates it "1964 (replica of 1913 original)". It came from the same Milan edition: the museum records the place of manufacture as Milan, Italy, the credit line as "Gift of Galleria Schwarz, 1964", and the accession number as 1964-175-1.
One detail of how these replicas were produced matters more than it first appears. Centre Pompidou states that the 1964 versions were worked up from historical photographs. The original was gone, so the model was not the object but pictures of it.
That puts a photograph at the centre of the chain twice over. A photograph of the lost 1913 assembly was the pattern for the 1964 objects, and a photograph of a 1964 object is all a reader can see now. Marcel Duchamp's willingness to let an idea travel that way is consistent with everything else he did after 1913.
Bicycle Wheel is the only one of his readymades with a moving part. The Museum of Modern Art points to that movement as the thing that separates it from the objects that followed. A snow shovel and a urinal sit still. A wheel on a stool can be pushed, and it keeps going.
The motion also connects the object forwards. Centre Pompidou notes that some critics read the spinning wheel as a prototype of the optical machines Marcel Duchamp built in the 1920s and 1930s. Those machines include the Rotative plaques verre and the Rotoreliefs. Those machines produced the seven minutes of turning discs in his 1926 film Anémic Cinéma.
Museums do not let visitors spin the wheel. Showing it as a still object removes the exact quality Marcel Duchamp said he valued in it.
Bicycle Wheel moved the location of artistic work. Before it, the evidence of an artist was a made surface or a shaped mass. After it, selection, placement and naming could carry the whole of the argument, and the object could arrive from a factory unaltered.
The Museum of Modern Art puts the consequence in Marcel Duchamp's own terms: an ordinary object could be raised to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist. Fountain in 1917 made that claim publicly and got it refused. Bicycle Wheel had made the same claim in 1913, in his studio and with no audience.
Its later history carries a second argument that Marcel Duchamp did not plan. The original is lost, the replicas were copied from photographs, and the museum examples are numbered editions. A work like that has already conceded that the physical object is not where the work lives.
Close reading
Two factory products and one decision. Read the object from the top down: the bare rim, the spokes and hub, the inverted fork, the stool that receives the fork, and the shadow the whole assembly throws across the plinth. Marcel Duchamp shaped none of it, so the small physical facts are worth looking at.
1.The rim carries no tyre
The outer face of the bicycle wheel's rim is empty: no tyre, no inner tube and no rubber seated in the channel of the rim. Centre Pompidou records the same state in its own description of the work. A wheel without a tyre cannot be ridden, so the object lost its one function before anything else was done to it.
2.The spokes screw into the rim
Small threaded fittings sit in the wheel's rim at even intervals, each holding the end of one spoke. They are ordinary bicycle hardware, visible because no tyre covers the rim and because the paint stops short of them. Somebody built the wheel to be straightened and tightened at each spoke, and the museum record never names that person.
3.The spokes cross rather than radiate
The spokes do not run straight from hub to rim. They leave the hub at a tangent and cross two or three of their neighbours on the way out. A wheel is built that way so that it can carry drive and braking loads. Standing still in a gallery, this wheel carries none. That crossing pattern records work the object will never do again.
4.The hub is the one unpainted thing
Everything else in the object is painted, the wheel black and the stool white. The wheel's hub is bare metal, and it is the brightest point in the photograph. Its two flanges are drilled around their edges for the spoke heads, and a highlight runs along the barrel between them.
5.The axle end and its nut
The wheel's axle passes through the end of the bicycle fork, held by a nut that projects clear of it. A short threaded stub stands out beyond the nut. That nut is the only joint in the whole object that does any work, and a bicycle would have had it anyway.
6.The fork turned over
The two blades of the bicycle fork come down from the axle and meet in a tight U below the rim. On a bicycle this end would point upward into the frame. Here it points at the floor, exactly as Marcel Duchamp described it when he said he put the wheel on a stool with the fork downwards.
7.Where the fork enters the seat
The fork's neck below that U is turned with two fine rings and ends in a stepped collar with a bright edge, sitting flat on the stool's seat. The neck runs on through a hole bored in the wood. That collar and neck are the entire structural connection between the two objects, and the neck is a bicycle part doing an unmodified bicycle job in the wrong place.
8.The seat under thick white paint
The stool's seat is a single round disc of wood, faintly hollowed on top and rounded at the edge, under white paint thick enough to pool and gloss. The museum lists the materials only as wheel and painted wood. It does not record who painted the stool, or whether the paint was there before Marcel Duchamp used it.
9.The wheel's shadow lies on the seat
Light from the upper left drops the wheel's shadow onto the back of the stool's seat. Inside the grey band the spokes appear as faint parallel lines. The stool is carrying the wheel twice over, once as weight and once as a picture of it.
10.The legs were turned on a lathe
Each of the stool's legs is lathe-turned, swelling into bead rings at the points where the cross-rails enter. The shaping is decorative and entirely conventional for a shop stool of the period. The turning is also the only carved form anywhere in the work, and an unknown turner made it.
11.Two tiers of stretchers, set at different heights
Plain dowel rails tie the stool's legs together at two levels, and the rails on adjacent faces are staggered rather than set in one ring. Staggering them lets the shaped end of each rail enter the leg without meeting its neighbour inside the wood. That is a joiner's solution to a problem of strength, and it is visible only because the stool has been raised to eye level.
12.A metal glide in the foot
A small round metal stud is set into the end of each stool leg. Studs like this were driven into stool feet to stop the bare wood splitting on a hard floor. The stool was made to be dragged about a workshop, and the object still carries that history.
13.The shadow redraws the wheel as an ellipse
The shadow on the plinth is the wheel flattened into an ellipse, with the spokes surviving as faint radiating lines and the rim as a darker outline. Seen from directly in front the wheel is a circle. Its shadow is the same circle drawn in perspective. The museum's record does not treat the shadow as part of the work, and the shadow changes with the lighting of each installation.
14.No signature is legible from this side
Centre Pompidou records that Marcel Duchamp signed the 1964 edition, but nothing readable appears anywhere in this photograph. The seat edge, the legs and the rim are all blank. Editioned replicas of the readymades are normally inscribed underneath, on a surface a standing viewer never sees and a single frontal photograph cannot reach.
15.One photograph cannot show the turning
The frame holds one angle, taken from slightly left of centre and a little below the seat. The back of the stool, the underside of the seat and the far face of the hub are outside the frame. Bicycle Wheel is also the one readymade Marcel Duchamp made that moves, and he said the turning was what he liked. A still photograph cannot show that.
1913
Marcel Duchamp mounts a tyreless bicycle wheel upside down on a stool in his Paris studio. He gives it no title, shows it to nobody in particular, and later says it was simply a distraction.
1915
Marcel Duchamp leaves France for the United States in August, leaving the object in Paris. In New York he coins the word "readymade" for manufactured objects selected and presented as art.
1951
A third version is made in New York for an exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery. Sidney Janis picks the wheel in Paris and the stool in Brooklyn, and Marcel Duchamp assembles them. That version is now in the Museum of Modern Art.
1964
Arturo Schwarz's gallery in Milan assembles an edition of eight replicas from historical photographs, authorised and signed by Marcel Duchamp. The Philadelphia Museum of Art receives its copy from Galleria Schwarz the same year.
1986
The Musée national d'art moderne buys the sixth replica of the 1964 edition, inventory number AM 1986-286.
Philadelphia Museum of Art
2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, PA 19130, United States
The 1913 original is lost. Versions are also held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Centre Pompidou in Paris.
Plan your visit on the museum’s official website (opens in a new tab)A bicycle wheel without a tyre, mounted upside down on a wooden stool. Marcel Duchamp assembled it in his Paris studio in 1913, and it is generally counted as the first readymade: a manufactured object presented as art without being altered.
No. The 1913 object is lost. The Philadelphia Museum of Art's version was made in 1964, the Museum of Modern Art's in 1951, and Centre Pompidou's in 1964. Museums label them replicas or numbered versions rather than originals.
Marcel Duchamp inverted the bicycle fork so that the wheel sits at the top and the fork's neck goes down into a hole in the stool seat. He described it himself as putting the wheel on a stool with the fork downwards. The arrangement lets the wheel spin freely at chest height.
No. He coined the word after moving from Paris to New York in 1915, so the object is two years older than the category it now heads. He said there was no idea of a readymade behind it at the time and that it was simply a distraction.
Unidentified manufacturers. Both are ordinary commercial products, and no museum holding a version names their makers. Marcel Duchamp's contribution was choosing the two objects, inverting the fork and joining them. That is the claim the readymade rests on.
From photographs. Centre Pompidou records that the 1964 edition of eight replicas was assembled by Arturo Schwarz's gallery in Milan, worked up from historical photographs of the vanished 1913 object, and authorised and signed by Marcel Duchamp.
Not in a museum. Marcel Duchamp valued the turning above everything else in it, and compared the sight to watching flames in a fireplace. The versions on display are shown as static objects, and visitors do not touch them.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art holds the 1964 replica pictured here, accession 1964-175-1. The Museum of Modern Art in New York holds the 1951 third version, and Centre Pompidou in Paris holds the sixth of the eight replicas issued in 1964.
Associated with · 1913
Marcel Duchamp assembled the wheel and stool in Paris in 1913, three years before Dada began in Zurich, and only named the category readymade after reaching New York in 1915. The object is therefore a precursor rather than a product of the movement, and the museums that hold versions present it that way.
Displayed at · 1986
The Musée national d'art moderne bought the sixth of the eight replicas assembled by Galleria Schwarz in 1964, inventory number AM 1986-286. The 1913 original is lost.
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View artistThe sources below include collection records, catalogues, scholarly research, and primary materials that informed this page. They document Bicycle Wheel, its making, and its place in cultural history.
Collection record for the object reproduced: its date line, medium, dimensions, credit line, place of manufacture and copyright notice.
Collection record for the 1951 third version, with the account of Sidney Janis sourcing the wheel and stool and the quotation about watching the wheel turn.
Collection notice for the Paris version, giving its 1913 / 1964 dating, its measurements and the museum's own copyright line.
Museum teaching dossier: the loss of the original, the edition of eight assembled by Galleria Schwarz from historical photographs, and Duchamp's remark that the assembly was simply a distraction.
Essay on the readymade, its coinage and the claim that choice alone could raise an ordinary object to the dignity of a work of art.
Glossary entry listing Bicycle Wheel first among the readymades and sourcing the "visual indifference" formulation to a 1961 symposium.
Pierre Cabanne's interviews, the published source of Duchamp's account of assembling the wheel and stool.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Bicycle Wheel page.
These references provide the documented foundation for this work's history and interpretation. Claim-level citations remain attached to the specific claims they support.
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