Fountain

A factory urinal laid on its back

What the viewer sees is a glazed fixture, unaltered in shape

What stands in the gallery is an ordinary wall-mounted urinal, the Bedford model, mass-produced by the plumbing firm J. L. Mott Iron Works. Duchamp did not carve it, paint it, or reshape it: he simply rotated it ninety degrees and set it on a flat base, so a vertical, functional fixture became a horizontal, self-supporting mass. It is modest in size, roughly 30.5 by 38 by 46 centimeters, in white glazed earthenware with a faint sheen.

On the outer curve, painted by hand in black, is the signature "R. Mutt 1917", not the artist's real name but a fictitious authorship invented as part of the gesture. The surface itself carries no trace of a brush, chisel, or any other traditional sculptor's mark; the only physical actions taken by the artist were buying the object, turning it, and signing it.

Because of the rotation, the round drain openings and interior hollow stop reading as plumbing details and start to resemble eye sockets, a basin, or an abstract sculptural form, an effect the object would never have produced hanging upright on a wall. Light on the glaze picks out curves that make the shape look almost bodily.

No museum copy today is the actual 1917 object: the original is lost, and what stands on pedestals at Tate Modern, the Centre Pompidou, or SFMOMA are authorized replicas from the 1950s and 1960s, made of earthenware and painted to imitate the original porcelain. This is one of the rare cases on this site where "what the viewer sees" and "what physically survives from the moment of creation" are not the same object.

A jury-free show, a six-dollar fee, and a signature that never existed

Duchamp tested his own exhibition's own rule

In the spring of 1917, New York was preparing the first exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, an organization Duchamp had helped found and whose board he sat on. The rule was simple and democratic: any member who paid a six-dollar fee could show a work with no jury selection and no prizes, a principle set directly against the closed juries of the conservative salons.

A few days before the opening, Duchamp, together with the painter Joseph Stella and the collector Walter Arensberg, bought a standard Bedford-model urinal at the J. L. Mott Iron Works plumbing showroom on Fifth Avenue. Duchamp turned it over, signed it with the invented name "R. Mutt" and the date "1917," and submitted it for the show anonymously, without disclosing that the entrant was one of the exhibition's own directors.

The name "Mutt" was itself a pun: partly a distortion of the manufacturer's name, Mott, and partly a nod to the popular comic strip Mutt and Jeff. Duchamp later explained it plainly: "Mott" seemed too recognizable, so he changed it to "Mutt" after the comic character. The invented authorship protected his anonymity and formed another layer of the work, a joke built on a fake name.

Technically, Fountain was never made in a studio: the artist's only labor was choosing a mass-produced object, rotating it ninety degrees in space, and signing it. This continued a method Duchamp had already tested, with Bicycle Wheel (1913) and Bottle Rack (1914): a manufactured object, pulled out of practical use, becomes a work through an act of naming rather than an act of making.

Duchamp argued not with a subject but with the idea of the handmade

The readymade was born as a refusal of the brush, the chisel, and beauty

Fountain did not grow out of painting or sculpture; it was aimed against that tradition. By 1917 Duchamp had already spent several years developing the readymade: Bicycle Wheel, a fork and wheel mounted on a stool (1913); Bottle Rack (1914); and In Advance of the Broken Arm, an ordinary snow shovel signed and exhibited as sculpture (1915). In each case the artist did not create a form but selected a manufactured object and moved it into an art context, stripping it of the one thing that had traditionally made an object a work: the trace of the hand.

This refusal was a direct challenge to a model of art in which value rests on skill and the uniqueness of the artist's touch, the model embodied, for instance, by portraits like the Mona Lisa, where an unrepeatable brush technique was for centuries treated as the very source of the image's authority. Duchamp reframed the question: if authenticity does not rest on manual work but on decision and context, what remains of the traditional notion of craftsmanship at all?

In a similar way, The Starry Night builds its meaning through the visible, almost sculptural trace of Van Gogh's brush; Fountain demonstratively removes that trace altogether, leaving only the act of choice. The punning name "R. Mutt" also points to another source, the tradition of wordplay and absurdity that Duchamp absorbed through the Paris Dada circle and his interest in the writings of Alfred Jarry. Calling a piece of plumbing a "fountain," by analogy with the ornamental fountains found in parks and museums, was exactly the same kind of verbal trick as the invented author's name.

An exhibit nobody saw at the exhibition itself

From an anonymous rejection to a lost original and museum reproductions

Despite the announced "no jury" rule, a few days before the opening the outraged organizers met and decided not to display Fountain: part of the board considered the object indecent, others simply refused to accept plumbing as a work of art at all. There was no formal jury, but the majority simply hid the piece behind a partition for the whole run of the show. Duchamp and Walter Arensberg resigned from the board in protest; an organization founded against censorship in art had immediately practiced its own.

After the rejection, the object briefly passed through the gallery of the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who shot it like a piece of sculpture, with dramatic light and shadow, in front of a painting by Marsden Hartley. The photograph appeared in the second and final issue of the magazine The Blind Man alongside the editorial "The Richard Mutt Case," which stated the defense outright: it did not matter whether Mutt had made the object with his own hands, he had chosen it and given it new thought. The original urinal itself disappeared soon after the show; by most accounts close to Duchamp, it was simply thrown out as trash along with other unclaimed gallery property. Stieglitz's photograph remains the only direct visual record of the 1917 object.

Duchamp returned to Fountain decades later. In 1950 the first authorized replica was made for the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and in 1964 the Milanese dealer Arturo Schwarz produced an edition of eight numbered ceramic copies with Duchamp's permission and signature; these are the objects that now stand at Tate Modern, the Centre Pompidou, the National Gallery of Canada, the Indiana University art museum, and SFMOMA, where the label reads "1917/1964" and describes it as the fourth full-scale version.

In 1993 in Nîmes the performance artist Pierre Pinoncelli urinated into one of the copies during an exhibition, and in 2006 at the Centre Pompidou he struck another copy with a hammer, chipping its edge, on both occasions saying he was continuing Duchamp's own gesture.

A 2004 poll named it the century's most influential work

The readymade became the grammar of conceptual art itself

In December 2004, five hundred British art professionals, artists, curators, critics, and dealers, polled in connection with the Turner Prize, named Fountain the most influential artwork of the twentieth century, ranking it above Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and Warhol's Marilyn Diptych. For an object no visitor to the 1917 show ever actually saw, this was an odd outcome: the work that had been hidden behind a partition became the reference point for how twentieth-century art defined itself.

Fountain's real legacy is not the image of a urinal but a formula: a work's meaning can rest entirely on decision and context rather than on technical execution. That formula feeds directly into everything that followed in conceptual art, from the combines of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns to the performances and institutional critique of the later twentieth century, in which almost any object, document, or gesture an artist designates can become the work. The word "readymade" itself entered the language as a category that had no equivalent before Duchamp.

The scandal has never fully faded: the Pinoncelli incidents show that viewers and artists still treat Fountain less as a museum object than as a provocation that can be extended or attacked directly. Parodies of it, from student projects to advertising campaigns, have become a genre in their own right, and the question The Blind Man's editors posed in 1917, who decides what counts as art, remains an open, working question for museums, auction houses, and artists more than a century later.