New York Times, Wednesday, March 25, 2015

I can't recall what compelled me to build a crossword around Duchamp's Nude… maybe seeing the painting in a Dada exhibition at the Whitney when I was 12 years old, or listening to Tom Stoppard's radio play Artist Descending a Staircase. In any event, the idea for the "staircase" layout came to me easily enough, though I had a rough time trying to fit NUDEDESCENDINGASTAIRCASE into the grid until I remembered that wasn't the painting's full title. (If you're feeling charitable, consider the "2" my homage to the mustache Duchamp painted on the Mona Lisa.)

The northwest and southeast corners were trickiest to fill, as evidenced by the antique crosswordese at 2-Down. I can only say in that answer's defense that Roald Dahl mentions the TUPI language in Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (alongside, naturally, Tungus and Tulu). On the other hand, it was a kick to discover after the fact that I'd started with ATOAST and finished with a cheeky IDIDSO.

What a beautiful theme! I love revisiting a seminal work of art, especially one with a controversial past. Duchamp's own brothers requested that he withdraw his painting from its debut exhibition in Paris, arguing that it was disrespectful to depict the nude form so mechanistically, engaged in such a humdrum activity as walking down a staircase. The Cubists felt it was not Cubist enough. And no one liked the title, which was seen as not sufficiently literary.

With a twenty-first century gaze, it's difficult to imagine why anyone would have ever considered this 1912 work shocking or even surprising. So here's my billion-dollar idea: glasses that allow one to see a work of art as it would have been seen at its debut, so that its groundbreakingness can be appreciated anew. Put on the glasses, and you temporarily have the cognitive history and experience of a Parisian in 1912, so that when you look at Duchamp (or Manet or Picasso or Giotto), you feel the "what IS this?" frisson, accompanied by delight or repugnance or confusion. The Apple version is the iEye (dibs on the trademark).

Right, back to the puzzle! The staircase architecture and circled letters tightly constrain the grid, necessitating several tricky little cul-de-sacs. I liked the inclusion of ARMORY SHOW and AVANT-GARDE, as well as the H2O/RED NO. 2 crossing. The southwest corner was a quagmire for me, with ambiguous cluing and the trickiest of the cul-de-sacs. Those are minor nits to pick, though. The theme just delighted me thoroughly.

Not knowing the painting, I hadn't really considered this one for the POW at first. Thankfully, having two J-named partners with knowledge in the arts made me really appreciate the theme. The difficulty of the execution naturally results in some compromises, but I found them well worth it. Memorable puzzle.

Numerals in the grid are unusual but this is the fifth occurrence of H2O. The first was in a 1964 Sunday puzzle edited by the first NYT crossword editor Margaret Farrar, and constructed by her successor, Will Weng.