In 1917, three men met for lunch in New York. They were the American painter Joseph Stella, Walter Arensberg, an art collector, and Marcel Duchamp, a French artist. After the said meal, they headed to a plumbing store located on Fifth Avenue, where Duchamp selected a porcelain urinal and bought it. Upon returning to his studio, he turned it 180 degrees and signed it as “R. MUTT 1917”, deciding that it was his new work of art known as Fountain.
The context for the purchase and naming of Fountain was an exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists. It was made to show works by anyone, subject to a $1 membership fee and $5 annual dues. Duchamp himself, as a celebrated foreign artist, was on the board, as were several American painters and art world figures.
This presentation was described in the press reports of the time as a “bathroom fixture”, it was signed and dated, but was it a work of art? Why or why not?
These issues were largely Duchamp's technique. Asking seemingly innocuous questions – with the underlying implications of “Do you really like it?”, “Why do you like it?”, “Are you sure about what it is?”
George Bellows, a leading painter of the realist persuasion and also a board member of the Society of Independent Artists, was outraged to see Fountain's presentation as was much of the board who did not see it as entirely correct despite having paid the correct entry fee. In the end, the board voted not to show Fountain, which provoked a reasonably indignant Duchamp.
Later, Alfred Stieglitz, an American photographer of German-Jewish origin who, throughout his fifty-year career, fought to make photography an art form on a par with painting and sculpture, photographed the work, or urinal in question, ensuring that his image was the only remaining record of the original object. It was reproduced with an anonymous manifesto in a vanguard magazine called The Blind Man. The accompanying text made a crucial claim for modern art: “Whether Mr Mutt made the fountain with his own hands or not has no importance. He chose it. He took an 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.” Thanks to this publication, and its initial scandal, Fountain became the renowned work of art it is today.
So much so that, with the approval of more than 500 renowned artists, Duchamp's famous work is chosen as the most revolutionary piece, even ahead of any work by Picasso, as the most influential work of the 20th century. As for the original, Stieglitz is said to have thrown it in the trash shortly after making the important photograph.
The object became a work considered very beautiful with an absolutely brilliant movement, which combined all conventional ideas about art. Duchamp has been compared to Leonardo da Vinci, as a profound philosopher-artist.
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