Guggenheim at the Tate, 1965

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A feature film about the life of Peggy Guggenheim, legendary modern art collector, patron and friend of Marcel Duchamp -- not to mention one-time bride of Max Ernst -- is moving into the development stage. Eleanor Cayre is onboard to lead the project through its early phases along with award-winning producer Nikki Silver. No casting details have yet been announced, but as filming is not even scheduled to begin until 2012, news will likely trickle out over the next few years.

Jerry Ross Barrish, "Mona R Mutt"

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The popular show "Seduction of Duchamp" is coming to the Museums of Los Gatos. While many exhibitions inadvertently become a showcase of Duchamp tributes and swipes, this one wears its influence proudly. Chess demonstrations, lectures and other events add to the ambience.

Zhou Wendou, Untitled (three states)

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Chinese artist Zhou Wendou has made his name breaking down barriers between the mass object and the art object, or between the useful and the useless. The Duchampian slant of his aesthetic is on display -- or rather, not on display -- in his recent untitled demolition of a copy of the Fountain and reassembly of the fragments into a porcelain vase.

Bearded Lady (after Selavy)

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A recent benefit gala for the Minnesota Institute of Art featured a circus theme and such diversions as bearded ladies on display and a "wheel of dada" spinning for unique and fetishistic prizes. As local society columnist Maura Ryan put it, "Marcel Duchamp has my back."

Varian Fry

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New evidence reveals that American journalist Varian Fry, who went to Marseille in 1940 with "a checkbook and a list of 200 names," ended up saving some 4,000 people -- including the leading lights of the then-banned surrealist movement -- from the Nazi regime.

Fry helped smuggle Chagall, Ernst, Breton and Duchamp as well as Franz Werfel, Hannah Arendt, Claude Levi-Strauss and thousands of others out of France and into New York, where the surrealists notoriously remained for some time.