Duchamp: Artist as celebrity

WASHINGTON - Who is Marcel Duchamp? He's the man who, in 1912, made the masterpiece of modern painting titled

Nude Descending the Staircase, No. 2.

Except when he's the virulently anti-painting guy who, just five years later, took a standard urinal and declared it to be a work of art.

Duchamp is the entirely cerebral genius who just about abandoned art in favor of chess.

Except when he's the aging letch who worked in secret on Etant Donnes, a laboriously crafted peep show that's far too crude for us to present in this paper.

Just when you think you know Marcel Duchamp, he slips away again. And that may be the most important thing about him.

At least, that's the strong impression left by "Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture," an ambitious show at the National Portrait Gallery.

The exhibition adds yet another, little-acknowledged dimension to Duchamp: It argues that the art of portraiture - in Duchamp's self-portraits and also in images he let others make of him - was central to his whole career.

And it shows that, for Duchamp, portraiture was all about demolishing our stale ideas about an artist - or a person - as a single, stable thing.

In the 100 portraits in this show, Duchamp can be male one minute, female the next. He can be a European man of letters or an outlaw from the Wild West. He can be a fleshy prizefighter or a champagne glass full of inanimate scraps.

A portrait can't get at the essence of its sitter - because such essences, Duchamp says, do not exist. That makes this show an ideal fit for a museum devoted to digging deep into the art of portraiture.

One reason portraits mattered almost from the start of Duchamp's career, according to this show, was that that career, especially as it played out in this country, was built around celebrity.

When his barely figurative Nude Descending a Staircase first arrived at the Armory Show in New York in 1913, before Duchamp himself had ever made the trip, it caused such an uproar that it came to stand for the entire, questionable enterprise of modern art.

The fame of the work soon rubbed off on the man, and onto pictures of him. Duchamp's art became him, and he let himself become his art. As he once said, "The idea of the great star . . . is based on a made-up history." He was happy to assist in making himself up.

Duchamp's most famous self-portrait photographs - pasted into some of his own works and also used in 1921 for the cover of a magazine called New York Dada - depict the infamous painter in drag, done up as a primly fashionable matron named Rose Selavy.

That's a pseudonym Duchamp had already used to sign or even copyright his works; when sounded out in French, the name turns into the stoic "Rose C'est la vie" or "That's Life Rose" - which Duchamp later changed to the sexier Rrose Selavy, a pun on the French for "eros is life."

The young Catholic man, already well-known in that guise as the painter of a famous picture, was not afraid to try on a new gender, age and religion.

As Duchamp said, however, the goal "was not to change my identity, but to have two identities" - not to definitively switch who he was or how people read him, which is what cross-dressing or conversion usually accomplishes, but to multiply identities so as to undermine them all.

"I don't believe in the word 'being,' " Duchamp once said. "The idea is a human invention. ... It's an essential[ist] concept, which doesn't exist at all, and which I don't believe in."

In 1917, Duchamp had already diluted his "being" by turning himself into identical quintuplets, thanks to a photo taken in a five-way mirror.

Once he came up with Rrose, that dilution really took off. By 1923, he'd put his own face, in profile and square on, on a fake "wanted" poster that called for the arrest of a certain George W. Welch, "alias Bull, alias Pickens ... known also under the name Rrose Selavy."

With Duchamp, the kind of handbill that's usually used to clear up identity, and to point to a single individual, multiplies identities instead.

A year later, Duchamp's artist friend Francis Picabia put Duchamp's "face" on the cover of the magazine 391 - but the portrait was in fact a picture of the famous boxer Georges Carpentier, who looked a good deal like the artist. It had been Duchampified by sticking on the artist's ever-present pipe and the autograph of Rrose Selavy.

Duchamp's famous urinal, which he titled Fountain and saw rejected from a show in 1917, counts as the first time he concealed himself behind an alternate identity.

First, Duchamp tried on a female role: He started out by claiming that the piece was in fact by a certain "female friend," and we've no way of knowing if that claim, never repeated, is literally true, or if his friend was just another avatar of Rrose.

(Some now say the landmark work is really "by" the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, dada's wildest practitioner. A photo of her so-called Portrait of Marcel Duchamp - a lost sculpture that was the first-ever work of assemblage, and which portrayed its subject as a champagne glass filled with sparkly scraps - is this show's best image of Duchamp that isn't by the man himself.)

Then Duchamp scrawled the imaginary artist's signature "R. Mutt" onto the urinal, shifting authorship, and his own identity, once again. And all along he broadcast that the urinal itself came from the New York firm of J.L. Mott.

Fountain isn't in this show, despite its shape-shifting signature. That's a shame, because it would have meant more than several portraits of Duchamp by others. One exception is a seemingly straightforward etching that Man Ray did of his trickster friend, with the letters "C-e-l-a" and "v-i-t" inscribed to either side of a tiny rose scratched into its bottom corner. That's usually taken as yet as another play on "Rose Selavy," this time meaning "cela vit" ("it lives").

But the letters also sit precisely where you'd expect to see the standard inscription "sculpsit" (Latin for "he engraved it") or "delineavit" ("he drew it") under the signature on an Old Master print.

This time, however, I believe we're meant to read a Latin word that declares what is almost always true about the sitter in this image: "celavit" - "he concealed it."