Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2

Harrogate just emailed a link to this painting for the students in the class he is currently teaching, and eagerly awaits their response to it. In the Norton Anthology of American Literature, Harrogate's students will read the following:

The American public was introduced to modern art at the famous New York Armory Show of 1913, which featured cubist paintings and caused an uproar. Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, which, to the untrained eye, looked like no more than a mass of crudely drawn rectangles, was especially provocative [. . .]

Thus a key formal charcteristic typical of high modernist works, whether in painting, sculpting, or musical composition, is its construction out of fragments--fragments of myth or history, fragments of experience or perception, fragments of previous artistic works. Compared with earlier writing, modernist literature is notable for what it omits: the explanations, interpretations, connections, summaries, and distancing that provide continuity, perspective, and security in traditional literature.

This is only a small portion of a very long Introduction to the Anthology our class is using. Fortunately, Harrogate has a lively group this semester, and he anticipates there will be argument over the merits of the painting, as well as this whole business of "trained" versus "untrained" eyes when it comes to art. Hopefully the painting, in tandem with the poetry by Amy Lowell and H.D. that they will be reading for Friday, will be "especially provocative" in Harrogate's class as well.

Harrogate is curious what Readers here think of any or all of the following:

1)The painting: Either in or out of context, what argument, if any, does it make?

2)The quality of Norton's undergaduate-aimed description of Modernist literature (Again, bearing in mind this is only a snippet from a very long Introduction).

3)This poem, published by Amy Lowell in the immediate aftermath of WWI, entitled "September, 1918":

This afternoon was the color of water falling through sunlight;
The trees glittered with the tumbling of leaves;
The sidewalks shone like alleys of dropped maple leaves;
And the houses ran along them laughing out of square, open windows.
Under a tree in the park,
Two little boys, lying flat on their faces,
Were carefully gathering red berries
To put in a pasteboard box.

Some day there will be no war.
Then I shall take out this afternoon
And turn it in my fingers,
And remark the sweet taste of it upon my palate,
And note the crisp variety of its flights of leaves.
To-day I can only gather it
And put it into my lunch-box,
For I have time for nothing
But the endeavor to balance myself
Upon a broken world.