From 4 April to 18 July the Palazzo Grassi is showing a 300- work exhibition by Pontus Hulten of the work of Marcel Duchamp,the artist whose ideas have pricked through the whole history of twentieth-century art. Here we publish one of his last interviews, made in 1966

“Pathos means longing; yes, longing and feeling that wonderful things are possible but not really happening”

Talking about his readymades and his most complicated work “The large glass”, now in Philadelphia, Duchamp reflects on how little he meant to people in the late Fifties, when the painterliness of Abstract Expressionism ruled