The shadows are not real, but trickery painted in light gray on the white walls in the entrance hall of the Museum of Modern Art.

As if director Susanne Pfeffer and her team wanted to signal right at the beginning by pointing to the many installation photos and Duchamp portraits with his objects: the long shadows of the ready-mades are one thing.

Here's all the other stuff too.

Eva Maria Magel

Senior cultural editor of the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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As light-footedly as the "fountain", the little fountain in the room from the upside down urinal, appears several times, just like the bicycle wheel and the bottle dryer and thus already anticipates that it is about the unique value of all these world-famous objects and about that , what "pleases" sometimes doesn't work at all, it continues over three floors.

Approximately 700 individual objects, from tiny photos on contact sheets to installations such as the motorized rotating image, are brought together in a comprehensive exhibition that, for the first time in almost two decades, is showing the complete works of Marcel Duchamp (1887 to 1968).

"Eros c'est la vie"

There is more than one discovery to be made in the work of an artist who continues to inspire fellow artists and thinkers to this day.

To a certain extent, you can work out why this is the case in the chapters of the exhibition.

It is joyful work and one that always leads to outbursts of great hilarity.

Humor, says Duchamp in one of the film excerpts that can be seen on the upper floor, is enormously important.

The wordplay titles of icons such as the Mona Lisa with a mustache and goatee, "LHOOQ" ("Elle a chaud au cul") or the French window called "La Bagarre d'Austerlitz" (1921) are one thing, the printed booklet with the Palindromes of Rrose Sélavy, Marcel Duchamp's female alter ego, photographed by Man Ray, grow into Dada literature.

The freedom in the mind behind the work, even in the teenager who drew and painted dogs, siblings, country houses in his hometown of Blainville around the turn of the century, then made wonderful quick sketches of everyday life in ink and Indian ink and around 1909/10 a whole series of files , astonishes and is downright enthralling at the same time.

You follow an artist who was a tinkerer and completely independent, in a way through phases of painting and drawing to Cubism and his technical curiosity, which found expression in coffee grinders and chocolate makers.

And sees not only the ready-mades, but also themes returning, constantly transformed and expanded, thought through, as the passionate chess player, who was successful in tournaments, did with his games.

Sex and eroticism play an enormous role, it's no coincidence that Rrose Sélavy is called "Eros c'est la vie" after Duchamp's finding - Eros is life.

And, of course, it doesn't stop there when Duchamp himself experiments with male and female attributions, whether with himself or when the viewer reads his bottle rack as a diffusely feminine form.

So the look at this complete work is not only looking back, but at the same time looking forward.

Marcel Duchamp Museum for Modern Art Frankfurt, until October 3rd.

The catalog should appear in the next few weeks.