To interrogate that (accursed) share of modern art that is not the province of pictorial modernism but which, on the contrary, might, by way of a thinking of forces rather than of forms, provides material for an archaeology of contemporaneity – a contemporaneity for which, in our view, Matisse and Duchamp would constitute the two untimely ‘entries’ in a history that exceeds mere ‘art history’. This was one of the tensors of my research project which ultimately took the form of a trilogy placed under the sign of a critique of the aesthetic. At first articulated in two parts – La Pensée-Matisse (2005); and The Brain-Eye, subtitled New Histories of Modern Painting (2007, English translation 2015) – the project was extended into a third and final part in Undoing the Image: Of Contemporary Art (2013) via a more direct confrontation with Duchamp's work, and with the ways in which he deployed and radicalised an ‘extreme modernity’ aimed at undoing what Jean-Claude Bonne and I have called ‘the image-form and the aesthetic-form of art’. A modernity, then, not so much ‘iconoclastic’ (as they say) as pushed to its critical extremities. I should like to explore the return-effect of Duchamp on Seurat, and its presence at the heart of the process of my rediscovery of Seurat in a spectral play between himself and Duchamp, which combines with the solar shadow of Matisse who comes to trouble the whole assemblage by exposing its genealogy to the risk of a new de-figuration.

We could begin with a prominent example, by placing the famous Nude Descending a Staircase no.2 not in a direct descendance from, but in the shadow cast by that other scandalous nude, Olympia.