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Exhibit Studies Artist Who Tweaked 'Mona Lisa'
Filed at 3:28 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON
(AP) -- The artist who famously gave the ''Mona Lisa'' a mustache and
called an overturned urinal his ''Fountain'' is getting a rare
treatment at the National Portrait Gallery.
The new exhibit ''Inventing Marcel Duchamp:
The Dynamics of Portraiture'' focuses on the lasting legacy of the
French-American artist. The extensive presentation, drawing on
Duchamp's self-portraits as well as portrayals of him by Richard Avedon, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol and others, opened over the weekend and will remain on view in Washington through Aug. 2.
''One
of the things we discovered is that while Duchamp is still a giant in
the art world ... he still is not terribly well known to the American
public,'' said Anne Collins Goodyear, co-curator of the exhibition.
''We had the opportunity to pull Duchamp out of the shadows.''
Duchamp was no stranger, though, to the American limelight in the early part of his career.
When
he first arrived in New York in 1915, he already had a reputation. His
abstract painting, ''Nude Descending the Staircase,'' had drawn outrage
in 1913 at the first major exhibition of modern art in the United
States, known as the Armory Show.
''In
that scandalous show, Duchamp's piece was the most scandalous,''
Goodyear said. Newspaper reporters wanted to interview this outrageous
artist when he arrived from France.
Duchamp saw the chance to
invent himself anew in a country free of heavy traditions. He could be
a ''self-made man'' in America, giving him the opportunity to step
outside artistic boundaries and explore the identity of his subjects
(including himself) beyond a one-dimensional view.
''Duchamp
recognized early in his career that identity is not so simple as had
previously been imagined,'' Goodyear said. ''Covertly, I think he was
always upsetting our traditional ways of doing things ... to get people
to think.''
Along with co-curator James W. McManus of California State University at Chico, Goodyear believes Duchamp's lasting legacy is the idea that
identity is ''movable and elastic, not fixed'' -- that an artist can
portray the same person in wildly different ways to capture different
parts of identity.
At the center of the Dada movement in New York, Duchamp proceeded to playfully break all the rules.
There
was his gender-bending desecration of a copy of ''Mona Lisa'' in 1919
with the naughty message beneath the picture -- L.H.O.O.Q. The letters,
pronounced in French, translate politely as ''she has a hot bottom'' or
''there is fire down below.''
Then came Duchamp's female alter
ego, Rrose Selavy (c'est la vie), one of many aliases, who appeared
three times before the camera and again twisted the idea of identity.
Duchamp dressed in drag to be photographed by Man Ray and cited his Selavy alter ego as a collaborator in various works.
His
famous 1923 piece, ''Wanted: $2,000 Reward,'' was a riff on criminal
photography and the wanted poster. Duchamp pasted two mug shots of
himself onto the poster and had a printer add his alias to go along
other names listed under the face.
Duchamp returned to France
from 1923 to 1942. He created the unique Boite-en-valise, a portable
museum with miniature versions of his works contained in a leather
suitcase, in part to transport his work across German-occupied
territory during World War II. Versions of the Boite included
miniatures of the ''Fountain'' and ''The Large Glass.''
''You
have invented a new kind of autobiography,'' said friend and patron
Walter Arensberg, upon receiving the gift of a completed
Boite-en-valise in 1943.
By the time Duchamp returned to the
United States, he was an elder statesman ''with enough of a sense of
humor and irreverence that he's still very appealing to young
artists,'' Goodyear said.
In his ''Self-Portrait in Profile''
from 1957, Duchamp created a silhouette to portray himself. In 1964,
Jasper Johns paid tribute for the first time to Duchamp by doing his
own take on that silhouette portrait, with collaged paper and graphite.
Other artists played with Duchamp's likeness as well. More than one
artist did him the honor of drawing a mustache and goatee onto
Duchamp's image, just as he had tweaked the ''Mona Lisa.''
The
exhibit, developed over five years, is essentially the first to look at
Duchamp as an American, curators said. It's also the first to compile
Duchamp's self-representations with portraits of him by other artists.
Curators found more than 800 works with Duchamp as the subject and
narrowed their findings from various collections down to about 100
portraits and self-portraits.
Their findings included the
discovery of a lost 1937 portrait of Duchamp in front of his ''Nude
Descending the Staircase'' by Daniel MacMorris. The painting is being
publicly exhibited for the first time in more than 70 years.
''For
generations of artists over the last five decades, he has served as an
important place from which to draw ideas,'' said McManus, who co-edited
a 320-page catalog on Duchamp with Goodyear.
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