“Inventing Marcel Duchamp,” residing through midsummer at the National Portrait Gallery, is a playful, insightful, wholly absorbing tribute to the titular subversive. All of him. Or perhaps that should be, all of them.
The 100-piece exhibit — only a quarter of them actually by the hand of Marcel Duchamp — shows us the French-born prankster’s gift to posterity was to liberate portraiture from its own strictures.
“Prior to Duchamp, portraiture is all about fixing identity,” says NPG curator Anne Collins Goodyear, who assembled the show throughout the course of five years with James W. McManus of the California State University at Chico. “It’s about the notion that there is some sort of stable essence that characterizes people. But most of us recognize that we’re different people in different contexts. After Duchamp, one recognizes that identity is very fluid. … That opens up portraiture to become a playful field for reinvention.”
Reinvention was clearly in the blood of an artist who in 1917 submitted a urinal to a gallery under the title “Fountain” — and used one of the many aliases he’d adopt throughout his career to do it.
But reinvention was also still a fundamentally American idea when Duchamp arrived in 1915. People came here fleeing war and persecution, of course, but also to escape the lives they were born into and inhabit the lives they made for themselves. Duchamp found this notion irresistible. America’s rising consumer culture, and its love of new technology, captivated him, too.
The latter is evident in the 1917 “Five-Way Portrait of Marcel Duchamp,” made on a postcard machine in a Manhattan photo arcade — not the earliest piece in the exhibit, but one of two that acted as a kind of temporal and metaphorical pole for it, says Goodyear.
The other, Douglas Gordon’s 2004 sculpture “Proposition for a Posthumous Portrait,” is not a likeness of Duchamp, but contains references to at least two portraits of him — one made by Man Ray in 1917; the other, by Irving Penn three decades later.
The year after the postcard portrait, Duchamp gave up painting entirely, dismissing it as “too retinal,” too preoccupied with surface. Contrast that with the approach taken by Giorgio Morandi (currently the subject of a Phillips Collection retrospective), who seems to have shared Duchamp’s frustration with the limitations of paint on canvas, but tried to transcend them by painting the same half-dozen vases and bottles over and over again.
Besides identifying Duchamp’s conceptual legacy to successors from Jasper Johns to Gavin Turk, the NPG show claims Duchamp for the United States. “He’s not as visible to the American public as he deserves to be,” says Goodyear. “Precisely because he challenged traditional modes of art making and traditional modes of self-representation, [he was also] less recognizable to nonspecialists.”
Among the specialists, Duchamp enjoyed a reputation Stateside as a provocateur even before he arrived – the inclusion of his controversial, form-obscuring “Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2” in New York’s 1913 Armory Show of modern art had seen to that. As a high-concept clown, he exceeded all expectations, adding a mustache — and a racy compliment — to a replica of the Mona Lisa in 1919. He dressed in drag and made “Wanted” posters of himself decades before any rockers or rappers thought of it, or rock, or rap.
Duchamp became an American citizen in 1955, the same year he told an interviewer that the public whose opinion really mattered to him was the one that would survey his work 50 or 100 years in the future.
Fifty-four years on, we love you, Monsieur Duchamp — the whole, unknowable, innumerable lot of you.
If you go
“Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture” at the National Portrait Gallery
Where: National Portrait Gallery, Eighth and F streets NW
When: Through Aug. 2
Info: Free; 202-633-1000; npg.si.edu
