Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture (review)

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 that 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 with “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 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 to which Duchamp aspired. 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 favors style over the particularities of Duchamp’s methodology. David Hammons’s elegant simplicity of means is the exception here (p. 291). 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 approached 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 sleight of hand, its chronological mischief, has been attempted by others but rarely developed so effectively. Isabelle Waldberg managed 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...