Inventing Marcel Duchamp

One of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, Marcel Duchamp was a master of self-invention who carefully regulated the image he projected through self-portraiture and through his collaboration with those who portrayed him. During his long career, Duchamp recast accepted modes for assembling and describing identity, indelibly altering the terrain of portraiture. This groundbreaking book (which accompanies a major exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution's National Portrait Gallery) demonstrates the ways in which Duchamp willfully manipulated the techniques of portraiture both to secure his reputation as an iconoclast and to establish himself as a major figure in the art world. Although scholars have explored Duchamp's use of aliases, little attention has been paid to how this work played into, and against, existing portrait conventions. Nor has any study yet compared these explicitly self-constructed projects with the large body of portraits of Duchamp by others. This book showcases approximately one hundred never-before-assembled portraits and self-portraits of Duchamp. The (broadly defined) self-portraits and self-representations include the famous autobiographic