In January 1960, Jean Tinguely traveled to New York on board the RMS Queen Elizabeth, at that time still the largest ocean liner in the world. There can be a fine line between suspected arson and creative auto-destruction, and for this former passenger the manner of the Queen Elizabeth's subsequent demise would have looked suspiciously like a case of life imitating art: in 1972, the ship – recently renamed Seawise University – capsized into Hong Kong's Victoria Harbour, engulfed in thick smoke and flames; a haze of water spraying from the fireboats gathering to pay their last respects. It was during his transatlantic voyage, after all, that Tinguely first “conceived of a plan, a sculpture whose sole purpose would be to self-destruct […] ‘like a burst of Chinese firecrackers’ in the Museum of Modern Art!” Originally invited to exhibit at the newly opened Staempfli Gallery in Manhattan's fashionable Upper East Side, Tinguely's growing reputation as a kinetic artist had been further boosted by recent European exhibitions of his méta-matic machines; at the 1959 Paris-Biennale, for example, his “Méta-Matic No. 17” had produced 40,000 drawings. Meanwhile, the “sculpture whose sole purpose would be to self-destruct” duly became Homage to New York, a 23-foot-long by 27-foot-high white machine sculpture that became an immediate succès de scandale after its “suicide” in MoMA's outdoor Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden.