Compensation Portrait, Duchamp (1942)

·All articles in this series

Artist: Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) proves that perfection is inimitable and indescribable, especially when it comes in the form of a good joke. Duchamp's gags are sublime, generous, confusing, aggressive. Everything that matters about him is missing from the description "conceptual artist".

Duchamp is unique, and the tendency to stress his "influence" on art movements, from surrealism to neo-dada to fluxus, risks debasing his exquisite singularity. Sometimes he is utterly opaque, as when in 1915 he hung a snow shovel vertically from the roof of his Manhattan studio, inscribing it: In Advance of the Broken Arm/ (from) Marcel Duchamp 1915. At other times, most famously in the Large Glass, he invites a symbolic interpretation. But his power lies in the sheer fact of his art, its insane, arbitrary, bland being there.

Duchamp's straight man, in this instance, was Ben Shahn, the documentary photographer and realist painter. Shahn took this photograph of a poor white woman while working for the Farm Security Administration in 1935.

Subject: In 1942 Duchamp designed the catalogue for First Papers of Surrealism, a group exhibition in New York. He and surrealist leader André Breton proposed that each artist should choose a "compensation portrait" - an image of someone else - to represent them in the catalogue. The title of the exhibition is a joke about the immigration papers that exiled surrealists had to fill in, and the format of the pictures mocks a passport mugshot. Thus the blond dandy Max Ernst becomes a bearded old man, René Magritte an explorer in a pith helmet, Giorgio de Chirico a classical bust. And Duchamp turns out to be a heartbroken, emaciated woman.

Distinguishing features: It was surely Duchamp's idea; the shared credit with the less-than-witty Breton seems like flattery. This is the most hilarious of the "compensation portraits", as well as the most subversive. That is because it actually looks like him. The woman's thin, sucked-in face - long, hangdog, shadowed, melancholy - bears a resemblance to Duchamp's elongated, unwholesome phiz. It wasn't the first time he had portrayed himself as a woman; he put on make-up, hat and fur to be photographed as Rrose Selavy by Man Ray, and as the perfumer Belle Haleine.

The grief and hopelessness of this woman, which in Shahn's documentary photograph was an image of the cruel conditions of 1930s America, clings to Duchamp; we see that a melancholy lies at the heart of his humorous art after all. In Dürer's print Melencolia I, sadness is associated with thinking, and Duchamp is the modern epitome of the artist as thinker. His depths of (according to him) masturbatory narcissism are evoked by the woman's dark eyes.

As well as designing the catalogue for First Papers of Surrealism, Duchamp co-organised and designed the exhibition. He spun miles of string around the gallery in an immense web, which at the posh opening New Yorkers struggled to negotiate, ensnaring gowns and tuxedos. He also invited a gang of children to play in the gallery. Duchamp didn't attend.

Inspirations and influences: One of the surprising things about Duchamp is that although he had given up painting and indeed art, being for all public purposes a full-time chess player, he organised painting exhibitions. It was he who advised Peggy Guggenheim to get Jackson Pollock to paint a portable rather than fixed "mural" for her townhouse.

Where is it? First Papers of Surrealism, catalogue, New York 1942.