Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture

by Anne Collins Goodyear & James McManus, Editors
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., co-published with The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2009
308 pp., illus. 105 col., 49 b/w. Trade, $49.95
ISBN: 978-0-262-01300-0.

Reviewed by Kieran Lyons
University of Wales, Newport
South Wales. U.K

Kieran.Lyons@newport.ac.uk

A theme that exercised Marcel Duchamp throughout his life was how to extend his reputation once his career -- indeed once his life -- was over. How could memory be stimulated into furthering reputation? For Duchamp, fame in the present was less important than the esteem of succeeding generations. He articulated this most clearly in a 1957 lecture called The Creative Act where 'posterity', as he began to describe it, was valued as the only realistic arbiter of success; and now, 40 years after his death Anne Collins Goodyear and James McManus have assembled an exhibition and produced a catalogue of portrait objects and images that were commissioned for a variety of reasons, but which Duchamp intended as a guide to his trajectory into the unforeseeable future. The exhibition, Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture (National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institute, Washington) examined these strategies while tacitly contributing to Duchamp's long term line of attack. The achievement of the exhibition has been to unify his complex strategy of reappraisal and reinvention, which he developed with the help of a range of male and female alter-egos and pseudonyms, as well as briefly contemplating the adoption of a Jewish identity, although his/ her gender still remains unclear. Duchamp was, in fact, the son of a provincial notary with two elder brothers who were already established artists in the Paris avant garde who thought fit to protect their father from embarrassment by changing their own names so that his name would not be associated with their activities. Marcel did not seem to share the same filial concern. Nevertheless it is clear that the idea of changing identities was already established in the Duchamp family before Marcel substituted his name for R. Mutt in 1917.

The catalogue for Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture , extends the theme of identity into five extended essays, followed by a comprehensive illustrated section of over a 100 portraits of Duchamp in chronological order. The attached commentaries attest to Duchamp's enigmatic presence and burgeoning public profile after 1915. These portraits are typically, but not exclusively, photographic and were predominantly created under his watchful gaze. The photographs tend to be posed and serious with very few informal images appearing amongst them. Snapshots were evidently unsuited to the timeless condition that Duchamp aspired to. His pose is studied, even formal. He could be, as with the case of the recently discovered 1936 MacMorris portraits, positively patrician (pp. 176-180.). His focus is invariably fixed on his own posterity while benignly supervising the artists/ photographers who did the work for him. In this section of the catalogue the co-editors have included a sample of works created, after his death, by younger artists. They can be contrasted with the portraits by artists who knew him and who contended with his mercurial personality. The recent images are less exploratory, more emblematic, more promotional as well and few of them match the insight that his contemporaries brought to bear. They conform, instead, to an imperative that favours style over the particularities of Duchamp's methodology. David Hammons' elegant simplicity of means is the exception here (p291.) Otherwise the works are too frequently literal and come uncomfortably close to hagiography. Nothing competes with the strange, feral man in a hat in William Copley's 1951 Portrait of Marcel - interestingly, the only portrait that Duchamp displayed in his own home (p. 210).

Duchamp approaches his own posterity in Marcel Duchamp at the Age of 85 (he died at 81), which he created in 1945 when he was in fact only 57. This slight of hand, its chronological mischief, is attempted by others but rarely developed so effectively. Isabelle Waldberg manages it with her 1958 Portrait of Marcel Duchamp: the smoke from his cigar (p.31) prefiguring the dematerialization of sculpture while astutely referencing Duchamp's key interest in the 'infrathin'; parenthetically, this bronze sculpture might also mark the moment when Duchamp's emblematic cigar, displaces his pipe in the portraits after 1911. As with the surprise revelation of the MacMorris images, the inclusion of Waldberg's work attests to the impressive research conveyed in this catalogue. Furthermore it illuminates and then brings into centre stage subjects that typically find themselves close to the periphery of popular interest. Consequently, links between Duchamp's mystical 'tonsure' and the disreputable Rrose Sélavy, the importance of The Creative Act , the preoccupation with the 'infrathin', the particular insights of the women artists who worked alongside him -- are all, in their turn, cross-referenced and innovatively examined. The text and narrative in all five principal essays is easy to follow although at times overburdened with endnotes that have the effect of slowing the reader's momentum.

The editors have organised the various sections so that they function autonomously, which allows the book to be used as a useful reference work, easily accessed for specific information. This, however, creates an inescapable sense of repetition when taken as a whole, although this is perhaps only a problem for reviewers. It's a book that I will be recommending although the reader would need to be familiar with the key works that, for obvious reasons, have been left out. This must be one of very few books on Duchamp where the Large Glass and other signature works are absent from the list of illustrations.

The five essays are by major scholars although their biographies are not available until searching in the acknowledgements at the very end. This is a pity, the research is authoritative and frequently fascinating, the book is an important one and future researchers -- the arbiters of Duchamp's posterity --   would have found this information useful.