nude descending a staircase

this is a painting from a man by the name of marcel duchamp called nude descending a staircase. i dont know why i love this painting so much. maybe it is because when i was taking art history it was one of the first DADA movement pieces i had ever seen. we had just got over the jejune and boring era of realism and anything other than monet, renoir, or degas would have been welcomed. when this piece appeared on the screen i froze in my chair. it was nothing i could think up (as opposed to a girl tying a ballet slipper). it was genious, and the colors alone were enough to allure me for another glance. part cubism, part symbolic, all rebelious. that is why this is one of my favoite art pieces of all time.
duchamp only painted about 20 pieces in his whole life. he moved to new your city in 1910 (i believe) and after finishing the small number of works in his life devoted himself completely to chess. random. but true.
-esteban

(a little history)
'Marcel Duchamp (28 July 1887 - 2 October 1968) was a French painter and theorist, a major proponent of DADA, and one of the most influential figures of avant-garde 20th-century art. After a brief early period in which he was influenced chiefly by Paul CEZANNE and Fauve color, Duchamp developed a type of symbolic painting, a dynamic version of facet CUBISM (similar to FUTURISM), in which the image depicted successive movements of a single body. It closely resembled the multiple exposure photography documented in Eadweard MUYBRIDGE's book The Horse in Motion (1878).

In 1912, Duchamp painted his famous Nude Descending A Staircase, which caused a scandal at the 1913 ARMORY SHOW in New York City. In the same year he developed, with Francis PICABIA and Guillaume APOLLINAIRE, the radical and ironic ideas that independently prefigured the official founding of Dada in 1916 in Zurich. In Paris in 1914, Duchamp bought and inscribed a bottle rack, thereby producing his first ready-made, a new art form based on the principle that art does not depend on established rules or on craftsmanship. Duchamp's ready-mades are ordinary objects that are signed and titled, becoming aesthetic, rather than functional, objects simply by this change in context. Dada aimed at departure from the physical aspect of painting and emphases in ideas as the chief means of artistic expression.'