"The dadaists mocked the old mode, the surrealists tested and stretched it, but Duchamp waved goodbye to it. He introduced that contradictory moment of a new tradition - the shift from 'painting to the selection of objects,' is how W. Bowdoin Davis, Jr. describes it in the pages of 'Duchamp : Domestic Patterns, Covers, and Threads,' as he makes a convincing argument about just how and where Duchamp came to this new aesthetic." -- Alan Cheuse, from book's back cover.