In 2022 Le Violon d'Ingres, a black and white photograph of a woman's back marked with violin f-holes, sold for $12.4 million, a record for any photograph at auction. This episode reveals the guarded secret behind that elite Parisian image: its creator was born Emmanuel Radnitzky in South Philadelphia in 1890, the son of a Russian Jewish immigrant tailor, and spent his life scrubbing that origin from the record while placing flat irons, sewing machines, and mannequins at the center of his art.

We follow the 1912 name change, the anarchist Ferrer Center, the 1913 Armory Show, and the defining friendship with Marcel Duchamp that pulled him into Dada and ready-mades like The Gift, a flat iron studded with tacks. After founding the Société Anonyme and declaring New York too Dada to tolerate a rival, he moved to Paris in 1921, became the portrai ...