For more than a century, the art world has celebrated Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain. His work, simply a urinal signed and dated “R Mutt 1917”, is widely regarded as a pinnacle of 20th-century art, with a replica on display in Tate Modern, London. For some, Duchamp is the father of conceptualism, the so-called art of ideas. For others, he is a charlatan responsible for the demise of traditional artistry.
Now two leading art historians are challenging “the whole foundation stone of conceptual art” after uncovering what they say is evidence that the urinal has been erroneously attributed to the French-born artist, who simply played along with the charade.
Research by Glyn Thompson, a former lecturer in art history at Leeds University, asserts that Fountain could not have been the idea of Duchamp and that he had instead stolen it from a German Dada artist, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.
Thompson has identified her distinctive handwriting on the urinal, and he can now show that Duchamp could not have bought his urinal in a New York plumbing shop as he had claimed because it was a unique model from Philadelphia. It is a city that Duchamp never visited but where Von Freytag-Loringhoven was based at the time, escaping charges of shoplifting in New York.
Thompson has identified the actual urinal model submitted by Von Freytag-Loringhoven to the Society of Independent Artists exhibition in 1917 in New York, although it was not displayed and survives only in an Alfred Stieglitz photograph. He has even tracked down the only two surviving examples of the same make and model.
The evidence challenges Duchamp’s 1966 claim to have obtained his urinal from the J L Mott Iron Works in Manhattan in explaining his supposedly punning “R Mutt” signature. “Mutt comes from Mott Works, the name of a large sanitary equipment manufacturer,” he once said. “But Mott was too close so I altered it to Mutt, after the daily cartoon strip ‘Mutt and Jeff” with which everyone was familiar.”
Thompson has established that the company neither made this particular model nor sold it to the general public. “The pseudonym Mutt could not have come from the name Mott,” he said. Instead, he said that “R Mutt” reproduced on the urinal in the hand of Von Freytag-Loringhoven, who died in poverty in Paris in 1927, was a pun on the German word for impoverishment, armut.
Julian Spalding, former director of galleries in Sheffield, Manchester and Glasgow, will include the research in his forthcoming book, Art Exposed, to be published by Pallas Athene Books in November. “This evidence absolutely disproves Duchamp’s authorship of the urinal,” he said. “It means that the whole foundation stone of conceptual art just collapses. A work of art is not a work of art just because somebody says it is.
“This changes the history of art, and has huge implications for the contemporary art market, and the millions that have been invested in it.”
Spalding’s track record includes establishing award-winning museums, with Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art among them. In his 2003 book The Eclipse of Art he criticised Duchamp’s urinal for effectively saying that anything can be a work of art if an artist says it is.
Yesterday, he voiced frustration that the art establishment had refused to accept Von Freytag-Loringhoven’s authorship, as originally proposed by Irene Gammel in 2002, and ignored evidence in a 1917 letter in which Duchamp told his sister that “a woman friend” had submitted “a urinal as a sculpture” to an exhibition.
Over the years, Spalding has tried in vain to stage a public debate over whether a urinal could be art: “Nobody will discuss with me what they see in all this stuff. I’m now proved right.”
In his book, he argues that Von Freytag-Loringhoven’s work was more complex than Duchamp’s, and that she had submitted her urinal to an exhibition as the world expected America to declare war against her motherland, Germany. This, he claims, explains the signature R Mutt – mutter in German meaning mother, as well as armut, meaning poverty. “She was saying to America ‘don’t piss on my country’. Elsa’s urinal has many layers of meaning. These are all hidden under Duchamp’s puerile misappropriation.”
Von Freytag-Loringhoven appears in Memories of the Future, the acclaimed 2019 novel by Siri Hustvedt, who has previously argued that she was the real artist behind Duchamp’s Fountain. Responding to the latest discoveries, Hustvedt said: “Strong arguments for reattribution of the urinal to [her] are bound to be met with intransigence from the art industrial complex. There are too many careers, too much money, and a whole historical narrative at stake.
“There is also the simple fact that, had the work been attributed to Elsa from the beginning, it would never have reached art heaven. The perception of it would have been entirely different. Contextual reality, including the masculine enhancement effect is part of perception.”
In 1964 Duchamp reproduced more urinals, one of which is in Tate Modern, whose website says of Von Freytag-Loringhoven: “It seems improbable that she would have not have vaunted her creation of a work that had caused such a flurry of press interest.”
Spalding argues that Duchamp’s own paintings were “laboured artifices, self-conscious, cubist-cum-futurist concoctions un-enlivened by any imagination, let alone by any sparks of inspiration”, and that it is hardly surprising that he gave up painting: “His claim to have made the urinal was his revenge on art.”
