This was no small matter. The idea of having a jury-free exhibition of contemporary art had become invested with the aspirations of many in the art world for New York to become a dynamic artistic centre that would rival and even outstrip Paris. Duchamp, as head of the hanging committee, had already signaled the democratic ethos of the new Society by proposing that works should be hung by the artists’ last names (in alphabetical order) rather than according to the subjective views and preferences of one or more individuals. With the support of some backers, he and his close friends Henri-Pierre Roché (1879–1959) and Beatrice Wood (1892–1998) produced the first dada periodical in New York, titled pointedly the Blindman, on the first day of the show in part to celebrate (and in part to observe and comment upon) ‘the birth of the Independence of Art in America’ (Henri-Pierre Roché, ‘The Blind Man’, Blindman, no.1, 10 April 1917, p.3). There was therefore a good deal at stake in the decision of the board to defend a particular conception of art at the expense of departing from its own much advertised policy of ‘no jury – no prizes’. Responding to press interest in the affair, the board issued a statement defending its position: ‘The Fountain may be a very useful object in its place, but its place is not in an art exhibition and it is, by no definition, a work of art.’ (Naumann 2012, p.72.)

Duchamp never explicitly commented on why he wanted to test the principles of his fellow board members but it may well have sprung from his own experience at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris. In 1912 he had submitted his important painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No.2 to the Salon, and, even though the work was listed in the catalogue, the organisers, increasingly unhappy at the subject and title of the painting and how this reflected upon them, asked Duchamp’s brothers, who were also artists, to ask him to withdraw it a few days before the show opened. He quietly did so, but he experienced this as an extraordinary betrayal and later described it as a turning-point in his life. The creation and submission of Fountain can thus be seen as in part as an experiment by Duchamp to replay this event, testing the commitment of the new American Society to freedom of expression and its tolerance of new conceptions of art.

Within a day or so of the exhibition opening, Duchamp located the work, which had been stored in the exhibition space behind a partition, and took it to be photographed by the leading photographer and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz (1877–1946). (A diary entry of Beatrice Wood for 13 April 1917 recorded that she went with Duchamp to ‘see Stieglitz about “Fountain”’, while a letter written by Stieglitz dated 19 April 1917 noted that he had been asked to take the photograph ‘at the request of Roché, Covert, Miss Wood, Duchamp & Co’. See Naumann 2012, p.72.) As the work of art was lost thereafter (and had been seen by very few people), Stieglitz’s photograph, which according to a letter had been taken by 19 April 1917, became a key document in recording the work’s existence. Stieglitz was proud of the image, writing in a letter dated 23 April 1917, ‘The “Urinal” photograph is really quite a wonder – Everyone who has seen it thinks it beautiful – And it’s true – it is. It has an oriental look about it – a cross between a Buddha and a Veiled Woman’ (Naumann 2012, p.74).

A slightly cropped version of the photograph was published in the Blind Man to illustrate an anonymous editorial that defended the urinal in clear – and, in their implications, revolutionary – terms: ‘Mr Mutt’s fountain is not immoral, that is absurd, no more than a bathtub is immoral. It is a fixture that you see every day in plumbers’ shop windows. Whether Mr Mutt with his own hands made the fountain has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for that object.’ (Anon., ‘The Richard Mutt Case’, Blind Man, New York, no.2, May 1917, p.5; note that the second issue formulated the journal’s title as separate words.) Duchamp later said that he shared and approved of the views expressed in the article, which Beatrice Wood claimed in her 1992 autobiography to have written.

Importantly, Duchamp was not publicly known as the creator of Fountain at the time, although some of his closest friends (such as Walter Arensberg) must have known of, and many others suspected, his involvement. Stieglitz, for example, wrote on 19 April 1917, ‘a young Woman (probably at Duchamp’s instigation) sent a large porcelain Urinal on a pedestal to the Independent[s]’ (Naumann 2012, p.74.) Duchamp later explained that he had not made his identity known because of his position on the Society’s board: if his fellow board members had known he had submitted Fountain, their response might well have been different, and he would have been shown to have put friends and colleagues in a potentially difficult position (which, indeed, was the case). The fact that ‘R. Mutt’ was an unknown artist meant that Duchamp could test the openness of the society to artworks that did not conform to conventional aesthetic and moral standards without compromising the outcome or his relationships with board members, though at the expense of being able to avow that the work was his own.

‘R. Mutt’, however, was an unusual name, with comic overtones, and this might have given people a clue as to its falseness. Later in life, when asked whether ‘R. Mutt’ was a pun on the German word Armut meaning poverty, Duchamp was quoted as explaining:

Mutt comes from Mott Works, the name of a large sanitary equipment manufacturer. But Mott was too close so I altered it to Mutt, after the daily cartoon strip “Mutt and Jeff” which appeared at the time, and with which everyone was familiar. Thus, from the start, there was an interplay of Mutt: a fat little funny man, and Jeff: a tall thin man ... I wanted any old name. And I added Richard [French slang for money-bags]. That’s not a bad name for a pissotière. Get it? The opposite of poverty. But not even that much, just R. MUTT.(Camfield 1989, p.23.)

In fact, Mutt was the tall thin man in the cartoon duo but Duchamp’s point about having wanted essentially ‘any old name’ remains. On other occasions Duchamp recalled that he bought the urinal at J.L. Mott Iron Works Company. Surviving records for the sanitary ware firm are incomplete but show models similar, if not entirely identical, to Fountain (see Camfield 1989, p.24, note 23).

Further reading
William Camfield, Marcel Duchamp: Fountain, Houston 1989.
Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, revised and expanded edition, New York 1997, pp.648–50.
Francis M. Naumann, The Recurrent, Haunting Ghost: Essays on the Art, Life and Legacy of Marcel Duchamp, New York 2012, pp.70–81.

Sophie Howarth
April 2000
Revised Jennifer Mundy
August 2015