Name: James W. McManus, Ph.D.

Occupation: Professor of art history, California State University at Chico

Residence: Chico, Calif.

McManus co-curated “Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture” at the National Portrait Gallery with Anne Collins Goodyear.


Why I chose this picture: Duchamp, upon his arrival in America in 1915, was charmed by American culture, reading its visual and philosophical aspects into his work. First as a visitor and later a citizen, he wrote about the American fascination with machines; the beauty of her bridges, architecture, and plumbing. Also important to Duchamp was an emerging modernist material culture, whose representation he absorbed through his study of product displays, advertising and movies.

Significant in his unfolding visual language at that time was his “mechanomorphing” of the human form — translating images of man into machine. Organization of labor necessary to produce the volume of goods wanted by a growing consumer culture could readily be seen in Fordism and Taylorism — effecting not only a sense of the mechanization of the worker, but a loss of individual identity.