Duchamp's bicycle readymade

Duchamp's bicycle readymade is cited as an inaugural gesture of the modernist break in visual art. In the book’s argument, it is not treated primarily as an isolated object with a narrated history; it serves as one pole in a relation between artistic extremes, a relation that Richter’s paintings are said to explore by moving between photographic realism and abstraction.

The Readymade as a Modernist Gesture

The bicycle readymade appears alongside Black Square on a white background as one of two works that stand for the opening gesture of modernism in the visual arts. The passage groups them not because they look alike, but because their difference helps make a larger artistic break legible. The readymade thus carries significance as an instance of art’s reorientation of what can count as an artistic gesture.

Relation to the Opposite Pole

The book describes the readymade and Black Square as extremes connected through what it calls a Hegelian speculative identity of opposites. Their relation does not erase their difference: the argument depends on their remaining opposed while belonging to a shared conceptual structure. The bicycle readymade therefore matters here as one side of a deliberately stark pairing, rather than as a self-contained account of modern art.

Richter’s Passage Between Extremes

Gerhard Richter’s paintings are presented as an attempt to capture the passage between these poles. The analysis first describes Richter’s shifts between photographic realism and abstract color stains, then frames his work as a passage from realism toward the abstraction of the purely formal minimal distinction. In that comparison, the readymade helps establish the modernist limit from which Richter’s movement can be understood: its role is relational, giving the account one endpoint in a broader inquiry into how representation gives way to abstraction.