Marcel Duchamp reached the center of the art world, announced he was done, and spent decades playing chess, all while secretly building one final masterpiece in a Greenwich Village apartment. This episode traces the French-American provocateur from a family of artists, where he skipped academy classes to play billiards and learned typography during military service, to the 1912 rejection of his nude descending a staircase by the Cubists, which convinced him that every movement eventually becomes its own establishment.

We follow his library job, his reading of Poincaré, the airplane propeller that made him declare painting washed up, his arrival in New York in 1915 as an Armory Show celebrity, and the readymades chosen for pure visual indifference. The conversation covers the urinal signed R. Mutt submitted to a supposedly no-jury show in 1917, the mustached Mona Lisa, the eight-year labor and shattered glass of The Large Glass, the alter ego Rrose Sélavy, his career as a chess master, and Étant donnés, the peephole diorama built in secret from 1946 to 1966 and revealed only after his death.

• Why he called visual pleasure retinal art and wanted to reach the intellect instead
• How the readymade separated the labor of creation from the concept of creation
• Why he declared The Large Glass finished after it cracked in transit
• Why chess offered a beauty that could not be bought, sold, or hung
• How his epitaph in Rouen kept the joke going after death