Menalkas Duncan

Menalkas Duncan can be found in a book as a maker, rather than simply in a family photograph as a child. Princeton’s description of Raymond Duncan’s Les Travaux d’Héraklès, published in 1919, credits woodcuts to Menalkas. The surviving edition supplies material evidence of his participation in the family’s printing activity. Its age description, however, needs checking against the recorded 1905 birth year. [1,2]

He was the son of Raymond Duncan and Penelope Sikelianos. Their artistic communities combined performance, weaving, printing, and the manufacture of everyday goods with a program of Greek-inspired living. Menalkas grew up within this practical experiment. The family setting explains access to tools and instruction; it cannot tell us what he thought of his parents’ program. His own statements are needed before the experience can be interpreted psychologically.

His later craft work extended beyond the printed page. An obituary for the sandal maker Barbara Shaum, written by people close to her and published by Village Preservation, identifies Menalkas in Provincetown as one of her leatherworking teachers. This is evidence of a transmitted skill: a member of the Duncan family helped train a craftswoman who subsequently maintained a long independent practice in New York. The attribution deserves corroboration through workshop records or Shaum’s own recollections, but it gives a concrete direction for researching his adult work.

Menalkas was Angelos Sikelianos’s nephew and Glafkos Sikelianos’s cousin. Eva Palmer’s connections with Penelope, Raymond, and Natalie Barney place him in the larger artistic and family network. They do not establish a personal relationship between Menalkas and Natalie. Within the Constellation, his life extends the history of making into a second generation, from a Paris press to an American craft apprenticeship. The present record supports that specific contribution; a fuller life awaits research into his books, leatherwork, customers, and teaching. [1–3]