| One of the many virtues of this exhibition is that it convincingly demonstrates its central premise: that the cross-fertilization of ideas of our three hEROS was of inestimable value to the evolution of modern art. The force of their intelligence, channeled between Europe and America from 1913 to the present, still sends shock waves to new audiences. The Curator, Jennifer Mundy, and Assistant Curator, Nicholas Cullinan, have assembled a tremendous group of oil paintings, objects, readymades, optical devices, collages, drawings, and publications from museums and private collections around the world. The exhibition also provides an opportunity to evaluate the universal genius of Man Ray in his many facets as a painter, sculptor, photographer, conceptualist and filmmaker. | 
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L. Brandon Krall
Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia was on view at the Tate Modern, London in May. It traveled to the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona, where is on view from June 19 to September 21.
Man Ray, The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Her Shadows, 1916. Oil on Canvas, 132.1 x 186.4 cm. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. é ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2008.“Perhaps it will be the task of an artist as detached from aesthetic preoccupations, and as intent on the energetic as Marcel Duchamp, to reconcile art and the people.”
—Guillaume Apollinaire, Les Peintures Cubists: Méditations Esthétiques
One of the many virtues of this exhibition is that it convincingly demonstrates its central premise: that the cross-fertilization of ideas of our three hEROS was of inestimable value to the evolution of modern art. The force of their intelligence, channeled between Europe and America from 1913 to the present, still sends shock waves to new audiences.The Curator, Jennifer Mundy, and Assistant Curator, Nicholas Cullinan, have assembled a tremendous group of oil paintings, objects, readymades, optical devices, collages, drawings, and publications from museums and private collections around the world. The exhibition also provides an opportunity to evaluate the universal genius of Man Ray in his many facets as a painter, sculptor, photographer, conceptualist and filmmaker. Breton, the Pope of Surrealism, put it this way, “At a time when painting, far outdistanced by photography in the pure and simple imitation of actual things, was posing to itself the problem of its reason for existence… it was necessary for someone to come forward who should not only be an accomplished technician of photography, but also an outstanding painter… It was the great good fortune of Man Ray to have been that man.”
The arrangement of galleries by theme at the Tate Modern, is beneficial to an appreciation of the individual character of each artist’s work, and while spotlighting similarities, allows us to see the importance of collaboration in advancing the forms of artwork in general. The high quality of scholarly essays published in the exhibition catalog should be required reading in the field. The only failing, is the terribly off-quality, image-projection of the Spanish door with eye holes, that is a portal to Étant Donnés, serving perhaps to underline the necessity of seeing the piece as Duchamp intended it, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
At the same time, it is important to apprehend our hEROS in an expanded historical view; among the writers and poets of geniuses like Apollinaire and Desnos, musicians like Satie, painters like Picasso and Braque, sculptors like Brancusi and Giacometti, and filmmakers like Clair and Cocteau, who formed a supportive community in the arts that extended generally from the start of WWI to the end of WWII. It is necessary to understand our hEROS as they inhabited, collaborated, and carried on, in the invention of a cultural matrix, and to understand through fine historical surveys like this one, something like a world.
A consequence of the massive death and destruction wrought by WWI, was the extreme break with tradition that occurred for women as a whole. In joining the work force, to aid the war effort, the vital force of liberated women en masse, simply crushed the mold of societal expectations that had prevailed for centuries. The awakening of individual women from the closet of gender as destiny, allowed such exceedingly creative women as Meret Oppenheim, Lee Miller, and Elza Schiaparelli to achieve world recognition. Oppenheim had made fur lined bangles for Schiaparelli and was wearing one, sitting at the Café Flore in Paris with Picasso and Dora Maar, when the idea for the fur lined tea cup and spoon was suggested, and she realized it for a Surrealist exhibition a short time later. Yet, while she was a muse and lover to Man Ray for a time, and was considered an ideal “child-woman” by the Surrealists, neither Oppenheim, nor any other woman artist is named in the First Surrealist Manifesto. It is a marvelous and delirious, yet stridently pro-masculine tome throughout. After over a decade of depression, Oppenheim stated, “For women, the implications are that they have to live their own female life as well as the female life that men project on them. Thus, they are woman times two. That’s too much.”
It would be expedient to say that the desire to strip the blinders and imposture from society’s eyes, and to provoke a general revision of moral behavior, is a shared motif in all three artists’ works; eros and humor were the weapons they used. As Duchamp proclaimed, “The basis of everything is eroticism, but nobody talks about it…”
Duchamp spelled this out in his work, and in interviews he expressed as historical precedent and strategic influence, the “Realism” of Courbet. In Givens: 1st, The Waterfall, 2nd, The Illuminating Gas, Duchamp directly “quotes” Courbet’s shockingly realistic oil painting, Origin of the World. Stereoscopic photographs of female genitalia had been in circulation in French artistic circles since the 1860s, exemplified by those of Auguste Belloc, presently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of the exhibition, Gustave Courbet.
Both Picabia and Duchamp use the fig leaf in separate works in this exhibition, although the works are from different temporal periods, in different media, and are not displayed in the same room. Picabia’s marvelous painting, Feuille de vigne, uses the same colloquial expression as its title, meaning “that which is hidden, distasteful or covered up” and the motif is used jokingly by our hEROS to reference the Renaissance mania for covering male and female genitalia; in frescos, statues and paintings of classical Greece, a practice which is now perceived as defacing them. Our three hEROS used their inventive abilities to combine unlikely objects and to fashion “thought things” that direct our attention to the erotic vector in social life and art. Their battle was part of the advance guard that led to the sexual revolutions of the 60s and 70s, shaping world culture as we know it today.
Two particular works, The Joyful Widow, a self-portrait by Picabia, and Fresh Widow by Duchamp deserve comment together as well. The former is an assemblage on raw canvas of a roughly 2-by-3 inch black and white photograph of Picabia, taken by Man Ray in the Cote d’Azur at the wheel of one of his luxurious cars, directly beneath which is a painted sketch of the same photograph. This early work straddled definition, being neither a painting nor a photograph, and speculation on the intended meaning of the title continues to circulate. Duchamp’s freestanding, Fresh Widow, shares this quality of unclassifiability—is it an object or thought thing?—bearing a mocking copyright notice that reads “by Rose Selavey” (Duchamp’s alter ego). Duchamp’s prescience should be noted, as this was decades before issues of copyright had become as hotly disputed or closely examined as they are now.
By the end of the 40s in Europe and America, television became widely available and advertising began to develop into the massive consumerist engine that drives contemporary awareness, and influences the peer-driven cultural models of our times. Technological advances since the mid-twentieth century, when our hEROS were producing the main bodies of their work, suggest that three-dimensionality in such forms as the IMAX, lenticular media, and holography, would be irresistible media to them, if they were working today.
It is not easy to guess what the future holds, but perhaps liberated women will direct the next revolutions in art, wielding a kind of gentle collaborative power, to invent new machines for living. Previously unknown genres will emerge rendering male nudes for female delectation, turning the tables on the tradition of painting the nude. “Arbor type” Adams and Eves could realize a future world, with projections and waterfalls that Duchamp, with his Zen austerity and legendary kindness would enjoy. In a world dominated by consumer waste and diminishing resources, the deep humanity and individualism of our hEROS, act as cultural beacons in the oceans of time.
