Picasso and Duchamp were luminaries-arguably two of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. They also held radically divergent views about the aims of modernist art. Picasso’s stringent formalism and Duchamp’s abstruse theorizing amount to a heady dialectic, but thanks to Larry Witham’s exacting analyses of their biographies, art, and contradictory positions, their ideas emerge as clear as day. The result is a rich but plain-speaking book about the nature of modernism and the foundations of postmodernism.