In a sunny, wood-paneled, south-facing room on the second floor of the Huntington Art Gallery, visitors who’ve come to peruse the Flemish Madonnas and Constable landscapes, the cases of stately British silver and florid French porcelain, will happen upon something a little unusual over the next couple of months.
It’s not obvious at first. At the end of a hallway at the top of the staircase, a tall, slender sculpture appears framed in a window. It has a delicate and graceful mien, not dissimilar from those of the 18th century ladies in the portrait gallery downstairs.
Come closer, however, and you will see that this is not a lady at all but a loosely abstracted pair of legs, replicated and stacked in shrinking scale, in a manner reminiscent of Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase.”
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Article source: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/culture/la-et-cm-vance-swallow-review-20121224,0,455251.story