In April 1917, a 29-year-old French artist named Marcel Duchamp walked into the J.L. Mott Ironworks showroom on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, bought a standard Bedfordshire-model porcelain urinal, turned it upside down on a wooden pedestal, and signed it "R. Mutt 1917."
He then submitted it to the inaugural exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York. The submission was accompanied by a $5 registration fee, which, according to the society’s own charter, guaranteed that any work by any paying artist would be displayed without jury censorship.
What followed was the single most explosive scandal in modern art history: a provocation that gave birth to conceptual art and ultimately transformed how humanity defines artistic creation.
Marcel Duchamp, Fountain (1917). Original photograph by Alfred Stieglitz at 291 Gallery. (Image: Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain)
The Secret Rejection and the Boardroom Revolt
The Society of Independent Artists claimed to be open to all comers. But when the board members encountered a white porcelain urinal placed flat on its back, panic erupted. Board members, including painter George Bellows, declared the object immoral, vulgar, and an insult to fine art. After a heated vote, the board hid Fountain behind a partition, refusing to put it on display.
Duchamp, who was actually a founding board member of the society, did not throw a public tantrum. Instead, he quietly submitted his letter of resignation alongside wealthy art patron Walter Arensberg, without revealing to the rest of the board that he himself was "R. Mutt."
The pseudonym itself was a clever double play: "Mott" referenced the plumbing manufacturer J.L. Mott Ironworks, altered to "Mutt" after the popular daily newspaper comic strip Mutt and Jeff, while the initial "R." stood for Richard, French slang for a wealthy "moneybags."
The 291 Photo Shoot and The Blind Man
Determined to record his submission before it faded into memory, Duchamp retrieved the urinal and took it to the studio of master photographer Alfred Stieglitz at his renowned 291 gallery on Fifth Avenue.
Stieglitz recognized the radical visual weight of the piece. He positioned the white porcelain fixture against Marsden Hartley's painting The Warriors, illuminated it with soft studio lighting, and captured the famous black-and-white photograph that remains the sole surviving record of the original 1917 object.
The photograph was published in May 1917 in the second issue of The Blind Man, an avant-garde Dada journal founded by Duchamp, Beatrice Wood, and Henri-Pierre Roché. Accompanying the photo was an unsigned defense (written primarily by Beatrice Wood) that laid out the founding manifesto of conceptual art:
"Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not 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, creating a new thought for that object."
Into the Trash: The Disappearance of the Original
Here is the most staggering detail of the story: shortly after Stieglitz took his photograph, the original 1917 Fountain vanished off the face of the earth.
Because Duchamp and his circle regarded readymades as transient ideas rather than sacred physical treasures, no special care was taken to preserve it. It was likely thrown into a New York City garbage heap by gallery movers or discarded during Stieglitz's studio cleanup. The original fixture that sparked modern art's greatest debate was literally treated as trash.
For decades, the work existed only as a ghost: a black-and-white photograph printed in an obscure 1917 magazine.
The 1964 Replicas and Modern Legacy
By the 1950s and 1960s, as absurdism, Pop Art, and minimalism swept through the international art world, curators realized that Duchamp’s lost urinal was one of the most defining objects in 20th-century art history.
Because the original was gone, Duchamp agreed in 1964 to collaborate with Milanese art dealer Arturo Schwarz to produce an authorized edition of eight signed replicas (plus four artist proofs). Rather than buying factory urinals off the shelf, Schwarz commissioned ceramic craftsmen to hand-fabricate glazed earthenware sculptures to match Stieglitz's 1917 photograph down to the millimeter.
Today, these 1964 authorized replicas anchor the permanent collections of the world's most prestigious institutions, including the Tate Modern in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
In December 2004, a panel of 500 British art world professionals, including curators, critics, and artists, voted Marcel Duchamp's Fountain the most influential artwork of the 20th century, placing it ahead of Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.
Not bad for a $5 plumbing fixture that ended up in a Manhattan dumpster.
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