the idea of movement.. ..just transferred from the Nude [ Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 - Duchamp painted this in 1912] into a bicycle wheel Bicycle wheel, his early ready-made from 1916-17].

I wanted to do something figurative. Well I couldn’t visualize a whole man.. .I felt that I wanted to make a painting primarily with painterly means. So I flattened out my canvas and made them roughly rectangular divisions, with lines going out in four directions. That is, vertically and horizontally.. .And then I would free associate, putting whatever came to my mind freely within these different rectangles... I thought of it as related tot the automatic writing the surrealists were interested in.

Marcel Duchamp's 'Nude descending the stairs' is the result of the desire for motion. Here he has also eliminated representative form. This avoids the connotation of ideas which would interfere with the success of the main issue - the sense of movement.

Every day I studied the nude, and movement in the streets and in the shops [in Berlin]. Out of the naturalistic surface with all its variations I wanted to derive the pictorially determined surface.