"Duchamp Brothers & Sister" - "Works of Art" - NYTimes.com Francis M. Naumann Fine Art 24 West 57th Street, Manhattan Through Nov. 23 Mr. and Mrs. Eugene Duchamp produced quite a brood, with four of their six children becoming accomplished artists of the modernist persuasion, and one, Marcel, an out-and-out star. The siblings remained close personally, if not professionally, throughout their lives. And in 1952 Marcel arranged a modest familial shout-out in the form of a four-person show titled "Duchamp Frères & Soeur: Oeuvres d'Art" at the Rose Fried Gallery on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Half a century later, the gallery is gone, but a version of the show is back in roughly the same neighborhood, courtesy of Francis M. Naumann Fine Art, and what a delight. Unlike the original, this new one spans a few generations by including samples of work by the Duchamp children's maternal grandfather, Émile Frédéric Nicolle (1830-1894), a printmaker who specialized in urban scenes. But basically, the show is probably a lot like the first: an evenly balanced quartet on a chamber music scale, with all the players distinctive personalities, yet clearly part of the same vanguard world. The oldest of the siblings, who was born Gaston Duchamp (1875-1963) but changed his name to Jacques Villon in tribute to the roustabout 15th-century poet François Villon, was, like his grandfather, a gifted printmaker. And the earliest piece by him here is a fine 1911 pencil study of a surly young woman by the name of Renée, done for an etching. Although Villon made prints for cash, his preferred medium was painting, which, in the samples on view, he puts through Cubistic paces without leaving Impressionism entirely behind. His brother, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, who fought in World War I and died in 1918, was a sculptor, and he, too, combined new and old modes. His 1910 "Torso of a Young Man" is an Analytic Cubist take on a Classical nude, with a head bearing a strong resemblance to that of Marcel Duchamp. The version at Naumann is a bronze casting of the original, authorized by Jacques Villon and Marcel Duchamp in 1968. As for Marcel, he was ever on his own maverick track, which occasionally led to fraternal friction. When, in 1912, he submitted his attention-grabbing "Nude Descending a Staircase" to the Salon des Indépendants, his two brothers, who were also in the show, insisted that he pull it. He did as asked, and simultaneously changed the direction of his career away from painting to become the revolutionary we know. The incident didn't cause a permanent rift, though it might have made Marcel closer to his sister, Suzanne. Of the four artists, she's the least known. And if her merely pretty watercolor landscapes from the 1940s suggest why, earlier work, including a symbolically coded self-portrait drawing, points to a figure who may warrant research and reappraisal. Speaking of research, the exhibition coincides with the release of a self-published book by the gallery's owner, Francis M. Naumann, long a leading expert in Duchampiana. Titled "The Recurrent, Haunting Ghost: Essays on the Art, Life and Legacy of Marcel Duchamp," it's a serious tome, weighty with information but appealingly written, and with material enough for infinite future shows.