"Skeletons Descending a Staircase"
Marcel "the Champ"
This is the painting that both wowed and horrified patrons at the 1913 Lighthouse School for the Blind Show in New York City. Obviously influenced by Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, which hung in an adjoining closet, this Marcel carried the theme a bit further by stripping the model of flesh altogether, letting him, "get right down to the bare bones of this here Futurist movement." When it was rejected by the Cubist-Futurist Alliance in 1914, OtherMarcel started his own movement, the Animisimist-Vorticist All Nude Review, which grew to include one other painter, the Italian Giacomo Bala, who had recently died of frustration after trying to paint a portrait of a dachshund out for a walk. Bala's last words were, "the damn thing kept moving all the time!" ("La cosa maledetta continuava a muoversi tutto il tempo!")
Despite his sobriquet, OtherMarcel was never a champion, not even within his own movement. He persisted in featuring skeletons in all his later works, like Skeletons Ascending a Staircase, Skeletons Falling Down a Staircase, Skeletons Sliding Down the Bannister of a Staircase, etc. Unable to sell a single work, and consequently unable to purchase either food or paint or pay the rent on his wretched artist's garret, he perished in 1917 of osteomoroseness.