Duchamp, Man Ray and Picabia: Three Friends and the Making of Dada

In the spring of 1917 a porcelain urinal, bought from the showroom of the J.L. Mott Iron Works in New York, was signed “R. Mutt 1917” and submitted to an exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists. The show was unjuried, yet the organisers voted to reject the urinal anyway, and Marcel Duchamp, who had sent it, resigned from the Society in protest. The Philadelphia Museum of Art, which holds the world’s most comprehensive Duchamp collection, has reconstructed the episode in detail. What it shows is less a lone provocation than a group effort among friends.

That group is the subject here: Duchamp, the photographer and painter Man Ray, and the painter and publisher Francis Picabia. In the words of the press release for Tate Modern’s 2008 exhibition devoted to the three, the three launched New York Dada during the First World War, and their friendship, closer at some times than others, lasted for life.

A rejected object and a magazine to defend it

Fountain did not disappear when it was turned away. A small magazine, The Blind Man, edited by Duchamp with Henri-Pierre Roché and the artist and writer Beatrice Wood, published its first issue on 10 April 1917 and its second in May. The magazine carried Alfred Stieglitz’s photograph of the urinal and an editorial by Wood. Its most quoted line is four words long: “He CHOSE it.” The point was that the act of selection, not the labour of making, could be the artistic decision.

The Philadelphia account also names the apartment of the collectors Walter and Louise Arensberg as a gathering place for the circle. The version of Fountain in Philadelphia, made in 1950, is the earliest of fourteen full size replicas.

Man Ray in New York

Man Ray was born in Philadelphia in 1890, and in 1912, facing the antisemitism of the period, his family adopted the surname Ray, according to the Centre Pompidou. He met Duchamp at Stieglitz’s 291 gallery in New York, and the two, in the Pompidou’s account, created the New York branch of Dada together.

Their collaborations were often photographic and often jokes with a serious edge. The Pompidou lists Élevage de poussière (Dust Breeding) of 1920 among them. Tate’s exhibition hung Man Ray’s painting The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Her Shadows (1916) beside Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) (1912) and Picabia’s I See Again in My Memory My Dear Udnie (1913 to 1914). Seen together, the three pictures share an interest in movement broken into flat, overlapping parts, one of the themes the curators Jennifer Mundy and Nicholas Cullinan chose to organise the show.

A society, a museum and a name

In 1920 Duchamp and Man Ray joined Katherine S. Dreier to found the Société Anonyme, which the Hammer Museum describes as America’s first experimental museum for contemporary art. Man Ray supplied electrolier lights for the design of its inaugural exhibition in 1920.

The Société was not a passing Dada stunt. Between the wars it produced around thirty publications, more than eighty exhibitions and at least eighty five public programmes. Its 1926 International Exhibition in Brooklyn brought together more than 300 works by 106 artists from 19 countries and drew more than 52,000 visitors. In 1941 Dreier and Duchamp transferred the collection to Yale University. Man Ray, the Hammer notes, gave significant works to round it out before the organisation formally dissolved in 1950, by which time it had gathered more than a thousand works. Dreier’s bequest followed in 1953.

Picabia’s travelling magazine

Picabia was the restless member of the trio, and his vehicle was a magazine. 391 was a journal that travelled with its editor. The Kunsthaus Zürich, which holds issue number 8 in its library, notes that earlier editions had appeared in Barcelona, New York and Paris.

Issue 8 shows how far the network reached. In the autumn of 1918 Picabia had been staying at a spa in the canton of Vaud. After Tristan Tzara contacted him, he came to Zurich for a two week stay in a hotel, and his mechanomorphic works were shown at the Kunsthaus in the exhibition Das Neue Leben. The issue appeared in February 1919: eight unpaginated pages, printed in 1,000 copies on pink paper, with Picabia’s line drawing Construction moléculaire on the cover, a short manifesto by his wife Gabrielle Buffet and illustrations by Hans Arp. Picabia had already contributed to the Zurich magazine Dada 3. In other words, the man who helped start Dada in New York was also carrying it, in person and in print, between the movement’s centres.

Rrose Sélavy

The friendship’s best known product may be a woman who never existed. Rrose Sélavy, Duchamp’s female alter ego, takes her name from a pun on the French “Eros, c’est la vie”: love, or sex, is life. According to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Duchamp first wrote the signature on a painting by Picabia in 1921, and only later added the second “r”.

Man Ray photographed her. His portrait Marcel Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy, dated about 1920 to 1921 and now in Philadelphia, shows her in a hat, eyes lined, wedding band on the right hand in the European manner, looking straight at the camera. The museum’s catalogue entry calls it an early collaboration between comrades that challenges gender conventions, and Man Ray went on to record Rrose in several later photographs. All three men had a hand in her: Duchamp as model and author, Man Ray as photographer, Picabia as the painter of the canvas where she first signed her name.

Paris and the cinema

In 1921, the Pompidou records, Man Ray followed Duchamp to Paris. There he began taking his own photographs; some appeared in the magazine Littérature in 1924, among them Violon d’Ingres (Ingres’s Violin), and he took part in the first Surrealist exhibition in 1925. He died in Paris in 1976.

The three appeared together on film in 1924. Entr’acte, scripted by Picabia, is a film, and Tate’s press release records that all three artists made cameo appearances in it. The cast list is a fair summary of the relationship: each man playing a part in a work signed by another.

Tate’s exhibition also included a newly made projected version of Duchamp’s Given (1946 to 1966). The curators’ list of shared themes, movement, objects and their relation to photography, light and transparency, puns, performance and play acting, holds as well for that late tableau as it does for the urinal of 1917, which is perhaps the clearest evidence that the conversation among the three never quite ended.