Smithsonian.com

Above left: "Rrose Sélavy," by Man Ray, 1921; Private Collection; © Man Ray Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY / ADAGP, Paris; Above right: "1919-1990 (Portrait of Duchamp)," by Carlo Maria Mariani, 1990; Courtesy of Carlo Maria Mariani & Carol Lane; Art copyright Carlo Maria Mariani/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

In the five years that Anne Collins Goodyear, assistant curator of prints and drawings at the National Portrait Gallery, and James McManus, professor emeritus of art history at California State University, Chico, prepared the Portrait Gallery’s new exhibit “Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture,” they had a few key revelations.

First off, says Goodyear, “Although Duchamp is a giant, one of the most influential figures in modern art, he is still not terribly well known to the American public.” When most people think of Duchamp, usually what comes to mind is either the urinal, named Fountain, and signed with the pseudonym “R. Mutt,” or his parody of Mona Lisa with a mustache and a goatee. But there is much more to his body of work. His Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 ruffled feathers for being scandalous at his American debut at the 1913 Armory Show in New York City. His The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even, also known as The Large Glass is one of his masterpieces. He was a leading Dadaist and Surrealist who flipped the traditional notion of art, portraiture in particular, on its head.

What also doesn’t often come to mind is the artist, the face, behind the work, which leads to one of McManus’s revelations. “No one has seriously looked at Duchamp [himself] as a subject,” he says. But he and Goodyear are trying to fill that gap. The exhibition features 100 portraits and self-portraits of Duchamp, pared down from about 800 that they found, by close to 60 artists. The vintage photographs, prints, drawings, paintings, sculpture and film date from 1887 to the present.

Yes, the present. Many of the portraits in the exhibition were made after Duchamp’s death in 1968 but are heavily influenced by his revolutionary ideas about constructing multiple and elastic identities. He played around with profile, creating mug shots and silhouettes of himself, and aliases, even posing a few times in drag as his alter ego, a woman by the name of Rrose Sélavy (Get it? Eros, se la vie). And later artists would do the same, which leads to the third thematic-rendering revelation that guided the co-curators’ conception of the exhibition. “He’s an artist that reaches beyond the grave,” says Goodyear. After all, as the exhibition notes, in his last years of life, the artist carried in his pocket a piece of paper that read, in French, “Besides, it is always the others who die”—and the words became his epitaph.

“Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture” opens today, March 27, and runs until August 2.

The late Blues legend John Cephas, seated, will be honored at a ceremony on Sunday.

Born in 1930, John Cephas grew up with the blues. At age 9, his aunt sat him down and taught him how to play the guitar. And before Cephas was a teenager, he had his own guitar, which he used to entertain weekend guests at his family’s home in the Foggy Bottom area of Washington, D.C. The tradition that Cephas settled on in adulthood was the Piedmont blues, a style of “house party” music with alternating thumb-and-finger picking that originated in the foothills of the Appalachians running from Richmond, Virginia, to Atlanta, Georgia.

To honor the musician, who died March 4 at age 78, a memorial gathering will take place from 1-3 p.m. in the Smithsonian’s Baird Auditorium at the National Museum of Natural History on Sunday, March 29. Attendees will share remembrances and participate in a musical tribute.

One of the last bluesmen practicing the Piedmont style, Cephas became a familiar face at folk music festivals in the 1960s. While at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in 1976, he met harmonica player Phil Wiggins. The two would eventually form the duo Cephas & Wiggins. (Smithsonian Folkways released a collection of their music, “Richmond Blues” in 2008.)

Beginning in the 1980s, the duo toured through Europe, Africa, and South and North America. Of the experience, Cephas said, “I guess you could say we’ve been all over the world playing. I’ll go anywhere to play the blues and to teach people about Piedmont blues.”

In June 2007, Smithsonian reporter David Zax asked Cephas what the blues meant to him. Cephas responded, “It’s stories of life. All you got to do is listen to the lyrics, and you’ll see that they are related to some true-to-life experience.”

Louise Bourgeois' "Crouching Spider," photo by Lee Stalsworth, courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum

Our ears perked here at ATM when we heard that Jonathan Coddington, senior curator of entomology at the National Museum of Natural History, is giving a gallery talk tomorrow on Louise Bourgeois’ spider sculptures at the Hirshhorn. It’s not everyday that insect folks provide commentary on art.

I checked in with Coddington, whose research focuses on spiders, for a “sneak sound bite” of his lecture. We got caught up in a conversation about how Bourgeois considers spiders to be motherly protectresses. And light bulb turned on and Coddington offered this insight into why spiders are a symbol of femininity and why it is that they are feared:

“The hate part is actually unequally distributed around the world. It’s mostly in patriarchal cultures. For example, all of North America and Japan as well, which is also pretty patriarchal, have their myths about spiders, and the general motif for spiders is negative—that they bite and they lurk. But in other cultures, not necessarily matriarchal but more tied to the land, which would be in South America, Africa, Thailand and India, spiders are seen as being positive. The Navajo actually have a spider deity that taught them to weave, so they’re seen as positive, which is what Bourgeois seems to be cluing into. [Bourgeois' mother was a master tapestry weaver.]

“Marta Weigle [author of Spiders and Spinsters] argues that spiders sort of carry the burden of a point of view that we’re not very comfortable with in this culture, and that’s why they have these sort of negative connotations. Whereas other cultures, which more easily connect to a feminine source of power, feminine psyche, feminine psychic energy, see them in a much more positive light.

“Femininity has been attached to spiders for a long, long time because the original myth of Arachne. Many cultures independently have chosen spiders as a symbol of that, whether it’s because they make webs, I don’t know. The mystery remains to me, why spiders? Why not termites?”

To hear more of what Coddington has to say, stop over to the Hirshhorn on your lunch hour tomorrow. His talk is from 12:30pm to 1pm.

And for more Bourgeois, check out the trailer for a documentary being produced about the artist’s work.

We thought the National Zoo’s newborn clouded leopards were cute when we got the first photo. But now there’s video. Listen to them squeal! Animal care staff and veterinarians are feeding the cubs every three hours and monitoring their temperature and body weight. They’ve found that hand rearing clouded leopards increases the endangered species’ chances of survival.

To learn more about the monumental birth, read “National Zoo Celebrates Birth of Rare Clouded Leopards.”

Martha Washington by Gilbert Stuart, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; owned jointly with Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

In light of March being Women’s History Month, the National Portrait Gallery has devoted its Thursday night Face-to-Face portrait talks to first ladies—first, Dolley Madison, then Lady Bird Johnson and last week was Martha Washington, with senior historian Sidney Hart speaking about Gilbert Stuart’s unfinished portrait of Martha.

I ventured over particularly keen on what Hart might say about the 1796 portrait, given that it was recently used by forensic anthropologists to create an image of what Martha would have looked like in her 20s. If you missed the buzz back in early February, curators at Mount Vernon tried to revamp the first ladies image in an exhibition. They used a pair of purple sequined heels that Martha wore on her wedding day, admittedly trendy for her day, and a new portrait inspired by the composite image of the younger, more gracile Martha as proof that she wasn’t as frumpy as people tend to think. (And dowdy, gray hair is what people tend to think.)

I was a bit ashamed to steer the question and answer session after Hart’s talk to the “hot or not” debate that the media had weeks ago, especially given the women’s history bent of the series, but I was curious.

Of the composite portrait, Hart said, “I don’t believe it’s valid. It looks like a glamorous woman circa 2009. Martha was always described as very small but kind of plump. But the picture they have is almost skeletal and that runs against all contemporary description of what Martha looked like.”

At the time of the Mount Vernon exhibition, one of its curators suggested that maybe portraits were made of Martha in her old age so that the young nation appeared more stately, distinguished and legitimate. That seemed plausible to me, and another women in attendance at the talk would tell me later that she was comforted by seeing an image of an older Martha even in our time. But, when I asked Hart what he thought about this, he reminded the group that, “Portraits are very rare in the 18^th century so you don’t have many of them even from the wealthy. The earliest likeness I’ve ever seen of Martha was of her in her early 40s. Naturally, there is going to be more of Martha as she’s older and she’s First lady. It’s not like now where you can direct images and kind of construct a personality or persona by what images you use.”

The next and last Face-to-Face in the “Ladies, first at the Portrait Gallery” series is tonight, Thursday, March 26. Erin Carlson Mast, curator of Lincoln’s cottage, will be speaking about Pierre Morand’s portrait of Mary Todd Lincoln.