Art Institute wins global competition for modern masterpiece — a multimillion dollar bottle rack

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Perched in its new home on a stand by a window overlooking Millennium Park, the newest sculpture in the Art Institute of Chicago looked, well, ordinary.

And in any number of French households throughout the 20th Century this series of iron pegs on iron hoops held aloft by a set of iron legs would have been unremarkable, whether or not it was adorned with clean bottles hanging upside down to dry.

But this particular bottle rack was purchased in the last century from a Parisian department store at the behest of conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp. It was signed by Duchamp for its owner, the American artist Robert Rauschenberg.

And during its journey from store shelf to, now, a pedestal at the Art Institute of Chicago, with a transformative pit stop in the mind of Duchamp, it became one of the most influential artworks of the 20th century.

“If there are three sculptures that would define sculpture in the 20th century, this has to be one of the three,” said Thaddaeus Ropac, the European art dealer who brokered Bottle Rack’s sale to the Chicago institution on behalf of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

The Art Institute was set to announce Tuesday that it beat out other top museums to purchase Bottle Rack, the first of Duchamp’s “readymades,” a series for which the artist would go on to beatify other ordinary objects including a snow shovel and a urinal. Bottle Rack, visitors Tuesday will be able to read on the museum’s newest wall card, “upended tradition and artistic convention by revolutionizing the way we think about what an artwork is.”

A store-bought item turned into “art” merely because an artist in 1914 said so is the moment at which art traditionalists roll their eyes forcefully enough to dislodge a contact lens. It is also where devotees of modern art recognize the genius of the gesture, a foreshadowing of the kind of appropriation that has seeped into the very pores of contemporary artistic practice and culture more broadly. They understand that one of the iconic objects of the genre — “talismanic,” in the word of the Art Institute’s director — has now joined the collection of the encyclopedic museum on South Michigan Avenue.

“It will make a big noise in the art world because people are really speculating,” Ropac said, about who had been chosen to buy the modestly scaled work, a little bigger than a stand mixer. “There were many institutions mentioned, but not the Art Institute. I think it will be a big surprise.”

“Yes, this was a very, very competitive process, like so many things in the art market can be. … It was a race to the finish line and we came in first, and that always makes us proud,” said James Rondeau, the museum’s president and Eloise W. Martin director. “We see every success of our museum as a civic success, as a Chicago story.”

In making its pitch, the Art Institute emphasized deep connections between the museum and Duchamp, the French-born artist (1887-1968) who became an American citizen, and who, among other ties, helped the museum acquire the circa 1920 Constantin Brancusi scupture Leda with which Bottle Rack now shares a gallery.

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