The first rooms of MoMA’s Marcel Duchamp retrospective almost dare the visitor to find in his early paintings some hint of the artist’s future travesty of those mediums. The picture with which the show opens—a placid scene of the artist’s two older brothers, Gaston (Jacques Villon) and Raymond, engrossed in a game of chess—telegraphs Duchamp’s future, temporary abandonment of art in favor of the game, which, he avowed, “could not be commercialized.”

Look closely and there are more hints still if you squint. The ink and watercolor Woman Hack Driver (1907), distilling its subject to a mere chassis, likewise foretells his eventual mechanization of human embodiment (and, conversely, his eroticization of machinic apparatuses). Even the late Symbolist Paradise (Adam and Eve) (1910 –11) seems to hint at its scene’s afterlife in a Man Ray photograph, wherein Duchamp and Bronia Perlmutter reenact Lucas Cranach’s painting in Francis Picabia’s ballet Relâche (1924).