NEW YORK—As with so many things in modern art, it all began with Marcel Duchamp. The father of the readymade is generally credited with introducing the notion that artworks can be mass-produced as multiples. Though the term can suggest anything produced in edition, including a photograph or print, it is used here to denote a sculptural object produced in quantity.

In 1935, Duchamp made the first of his Rotoreliefs, a set of six optical disks with spiral patterns, designed to be spun on a record player. He briefly tried to market the works, produced in an edition of 500, as toys at an inventor’s fair. Around the same time, he made the initial incarnation of his Boite-en-Valise, 1935-41 (edition of 20), a small leather suitcase filled with miniature replicas of his own work, which served as a portable museum and promotional tool.

As with Duchamp’s objects, today’s multiples still tend to be mass-produced, are sometimes miniature and often whimsical, giving off a whiff of commerce. And even though the fact that they are mass-produced may suggest to some that multiples are the poor man’s collecting choice, it is precisely their accessibility that imbues them with conceptual nuance.

“Duchamp really opened up this entirely new way of looking at artwork,” says Cary Leibowitz, a multimedia artist and senior specialist in prints and multiples at Christie’s New York. “He’s the one who emphasized the idea that the art did not have to express the artist’s hand.”

Art for the Masses

Multiples became a recognized category in the 1960s, when artists—especially those associated with Nouveau Realisme, Fluxus and Pop art—began focusing on making art for the masses. In the United States, new manufacturing technologies emerged, along with several publishers of editions. Many of them, such as Rosa Esman’s Tanglewood Press and Marian Goodman’s Multiples Inc., produced objects as well as works on paper.

As Esman puts it, “It just seemed that since so much art used industrial objects anyway, the next step was to manufacture the art itself.” Many multiples from the 1960s play on consumerism, such as Claes Oldenburg’s 1966 Wedding Souvenir (cake slices) and Andy Warhol’s screenprinted Brillo Boxes. Josef Beuys, whose first Felt Suit in 1970 was made in an edition of 100, famously said, “If you have all my multiples, then you have me entirely.”

Many examples from this era also have a charged, fetishistic quality, such as Christo’s creepy Wrapped Roses, 1968, a rope-tied cellophane packet of flowers (two versions, editions of 75 each) and Oldenburg’s London Knees, 1966–68 (edition of 120), a pair of female knees rendered in painted latex and packed in a valise.

The making of multiples dwindled in the late 1970s and ’80s. But today, they are making a major comeback as artists search for new ways to reach a broader audience. For younger artists especially, “the ideas inherent in multiplicity are so much part of our culture. It’s now a part of everything we do,” says Wendy Weitman, co-curator of the upcoming exhibition “Eye on Europe: Prints, Books and Multiples, 1960 to Now,” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from Oct. 15 - Jan. 1.

Publishers’ Take

A number of editions publishers have sprung up since the early 1990s, including I.C. Editions, Editions Fawbush and, more recently, Carolina Nitsch and Christine Burgin in New York and the two-year-old Cerealart of Philadelphia.

“It was a kind of reaction against rising prices,” says Cerealart founder Larry Mangel, who has worked on projects with many young art stars. “We thought product was a really good way to reach out to people.” In 2004, Cerealart published six action figures with Marcel Dzama ($20; edition of 2,500 each) and a colorful soccer ball with Ryan McGinness ($150; unlimited edition).

This summer, it is shipping the first of three baroque busts by Kehinde Wiley, based on a Bernini sculpture. The work renders one of the artist’s contemporary African-American characters in cast-marble dust and resin ($1,000; edition of 250).

The art journal Parkett, an important editions publisher since its inception in 1984, asks contributing artists to create either prints or objects that are offered separately to subscribers with each issue. According to publisher Dieter von Graffenried, multiples were few and far between during the 1980s. But in the mid-’90s, he says, “I noticed an increase. In fact, every now and then, we have an issue where the majority of editions are objects.” For the winter 2004 issue, for instance, three out of the four artists—including painter Alex Katz—decided to create multiples.