Elsa's Fountain - Is Marcel Duchamp the False Prophet of Conceptual Art? (2025)

In 1913, French artist Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) took a bicycle wheel, mounted it on a wooden stool and called it Art. Here, the male-dominated art history canon would have you believe, is where Conceptual art began, opening the door for a plethora of subsequent Modernist styles. Following this narrative, Duchamp continued quietly working on his ready-made sculptures until 1917 when he, now a founding member of The American Society of Independent Artists, decided to test his fellow board of directors’ commitment to an exhibition consisting of any and all artworks that an artist sends in for display. In order to do so, he chose an ordinary urinal and signed it with a pseudonym, so as to not arouse suspicion of his involvement, before mailing it directly to the Grand Central Palace under the title Fountain. The resulting outrage and controversy surrounding the sculpture continues to this day for its groundbreaking redefinition of what constitutes ‘art’ and who can be considered an ‘artist’. But what is denied by so many scholars, writers, historians and academics, is that this narrative is missing a key detail – that Fountain is not a product of Duchamp’s experiment, nor was it his creation. In fact, an examination of the physical characteristics of the sculpture along with the historical circumstances surrounding its conceptualisation show that it can more accurately be attributed to the radical genius of Dada artist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874-1927).

At the beginning of his career, Duchamp’s preferred medium was oil paints on canvas with his work heavily referencing the likes of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, as seen in Sonata (1911), Nude (Study), Sad Young Man on a Train (1911) and Nude Descending a Staircase No.2 (1912). After seeing little success in this medium he quickly abandoned painting and, in late-1913, started working on his sculptural ready-mades. Although, he was only able to exhibit his ready-made artworks in two group exhibitions, one at the Montross Gallery and another two at the Bourgeois Gallery, both in 1916, where Duchamp’s work, again, went virtually unnoticed.1 On April 8, 1917, Duchamp had an artistic breakthrough when he took an ordinary urinal from J. L. Mott Iron Works, signed the front-left side with a pseudonym and mailed it to The American Society of Independent Artists. Unable to understand the sculpture’s concept, some Society members dismissed it as “plagiarism” or merely “a plain piece of plumbing”, with some contending “it was Immoral, vulgar”.2 As such, the selection jury decided Fountain was not an artwork and, therefore, could not be displayed, promptly removing it from the exhibition installation before the opening on April 11, hoping that its absence would go unnoticed.3

Duchamp had his suspicions confirmed on April 12 after realising the sculpture was indeed missing and he immediately set about finding the urinal, eventually discovering it hidden behind a partition at Grand Central Palace. He then took it to the studio of his friend and photographer, Alfred Stieglitz, to be photographed for the second (and final) issue of The Blind Man, a Dada art journal he co-published alongside fellow artist Beatrice Wood and author Henri-Pierre Roché, which was to be released the following month. Outraged that the sculpture was excluded from what The Society asserted as being an exhibition open to all who wanted to exhibit their art, Duchamp immediately resigned from the committee he had helped establish, later recalling, “when we found [Fountain] we took it out and took it back … and then I gave my resignation to the committee, I didn’t even discuss or say why—I just gave my resignation and they accepted it gladly”.4 Duchamp bitterly denounced The Society’s conformist behaviour while defending the sculpture’s artistic validity, writing in The Blind Man, “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 … [and] created a new thought for that object. As for plumbing, that is absurd. The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges”. Several of his artist and writer friends also joined the diatribe, including Stieglitz who argued that The Society’s “chief function is the desire to smash antiquated academic ideas”. Their first exhibition, he stated, “is a concrete move in that direction”, and Louise Norton who accused The Society jurors of being “fairly rushed to remove the bit of sculpture … because the object was irrevocably associated in their atavistic minds with a certain natural function of a secretive sort”, adding that, “It was a sad surprise to learn of a Board of Censors sitting upon the ambiguous question, What is ART?”5 Following the May issue of The Blind Man, Duchamp seldom mentioned Fountain and quietly continued with his ready-mades, and, after being photographed at Stieglitz’s studio, Fountain disappeared, leaving only traces of its existence in a single photograph and ambiguous mentions in a handful of letters.

Over the next 15 years, Duchamp moved further away from art and increasingly began seeing himself as a professional chess player, travelling around the world and entering himself in tournaments. By 1933, the era of highly trained German and Russian players dominating the chess circuit was well underway and, after several years of being defeated by these significantly stronger players, Duchamp was forced to admit his inability to keep up with the changing world of professional chess and reluctantly switched to the slower-paced game of ‘correspondence chess’.6 With Cubism being well past its peak and losing popularity to newer avant-garde movements such as Surrealism, he was unable to return to the movement he had been most successful in and so began to rebuild his artistic career by focusing on the only other instance of his earlier work to have had some impact – Fountain, and, by extension, his concept of the ready-made. Unfortunately, by this time, the only one of his ready-mades to still exist was a comb from 1916 given to, and long forgotten by, Walter Arensberg.7 This problem, however, was easily solved in 1936 when he began making replicas of almost all his ‘lost’ artworks, all but for Fountain.8 In fact, it wasn’t until 1950 that Duchamp made the first replica of Fountain, and only at the request of Sidney Janisfor the exhibition Challenge and Defy: Extreme Examples by XX Century Artists, French & American, which was to be held at the Janis Gallery in New York from September 25 to October 21. After Janis acquired a similar urinal from a flea market in Paris, Duchamp signed the same ‘R. Mutt’ pseudonym on the front-left side, although, unlike the replicas of his other works which were exact matches, Duchamp loudly claimed this version of Fountain, and the story behind it, by also signing his full name on the back along with that of his alter ego, Rrose Sélavy, followed by the word ‘replica’.9 After being asked by Carroll why he hadn’t yet remade Fountain, Duchamp simply responded with, “Oh, no one asked me”.10 Three years later, in 1953, Duchamp gave an interview to Harriet and Caroll Janis during which he discussed Fountain. This would be the first time he would talk about its conception and his involvement in its creation.11 Following his interview and exhibition at the Janis Gallery, Duchamp made two additional Fountain replicas, one in 1953 and another in 1963, with critic Ülf Linde selecting the urinal in Stockholm, after which time he was again mute on the topic. That was until 1966 when Italian gallerist Arturo Schwarz made a deal with Duchamp to sell replicas of the sculpture, he then created a further eight, each of which were to be sold for $20,000 (equivalent to $196,000 in 2025).12

It seems strange that Duchamp would spend almost 40 years neglecting to talk about an artwork that was having such a profound impact on art in the West, especially when he was the person it was being credited to. In fact, Duchamp didn’t even allow his name to be associated with the artwork for over a decade until the late 1920s and only assumed its authorship in the 1950s when he began making replicas. Stranger still that when he did, finally, begin discussing Fountain, he was unable to explain or recall key conceptual and historical details such as why he chose a urinal as opposed to another object, where the pseudonym ‘Richard Mutt’ came from and what influenced him in this artistic direction.

In his 1953 interview, the earliest account of his association with Fountain, Harriet Janis asked, “On the urinal—that was a scandal—wasn’t it?” to which Duchamp answered, not with a response to the “scandal” that ensued or an explanation of why he chose the pseudonym only to never use it again, but with a confused ramble on where “Richard” came from, stating, “Richard Mutt—Richard was very—Richard I don’t know where Richard came from—maybe it was Richard Mott—I don’t think so because we wouldn’t want to—we bought it at Mott Works on Fifth Ave—and we called it Fountain—I don’t know why because I think [Joseph] Stella and [Walter] Arensberg decided it was better to call it Fountain … ”.13

Sidney Janis then asked, “In relation to a specific example, I wonder if you would tell us something of your choice of the Fountain and how that came about?” to which he blabbered a lengthy response:

“Well that was, I don’t know how it was, it was of course very—it had to be scandalous—the idea of scandal was—presided to the choice—to send something to the Independents—we were talking, Stella and I and Arensberg and I—we spoke of it for doing it and came to the idea of a urinal—then we thought we would buy one, you see of course it went with the idea of ready-mades—already existed then, you see it was at 67th St. here in my studio and all these ready-mades were on the ceiling—the idea of getting a urinal came all of itself, you see it was not difficult to have the idea and well, once the idea was there it was done—we would send it to the Independents and nom-de-plume because we didn’t want to attract the attention, not that we were ashamed of it at all, but it would have been silly on my part being one of the members of the Committee to do it as a form of reaction or as something of a revolutionary gesture and sort of play with my authority there to force it in, so to speak—I didn’t want to use it in connection with my position—so that’s why we introduced the word “Mutt” in it and I think of course it was a play on Mott works where we bought this thing and changed to mutt, m-u-t-t instead of m-o-t-t and Richard, I don’t know where Richard came—it must have been Richard Mott works, or we just invented the name Richard for the fun of it either, I can’t remember the details”.14

Although, in that same interview, he also claimed that ‘Mott’ was changed to ‘Mutt’ “because of Mutt & Jeff”, a comedic comic strip popular in the United States at the time, before later returning to his original claim in a 1966 interview with Otto Hahn, wherein he affirmed, “Mutt comes from Mott Works, the name of a large sanitary equipment manufacturer … And I added Richard. That’s not a bad name for a pissotière. Get it?”15 More recent suggestions that ‘Mutt’ could have been derived from ‘armut’, the German word for ‘poverty’, and that the sculpture is a protest against the United States declaring war on Germany in the week before the exhibition, is highly improbable given that Duchamp didn’t speak German, nor had he ever visited the country, and it is therefore unlikely that he would have known the translation.16 Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, however, would most certainly have known this.

Adding to Duchamp’s own confusion regarding the events surrounding Fountain and his involvement, what few details he was able to give were, for the most part, incorrect – J. L. Mott Iron Works, where he claimed to have purchased the urinal, never sold that specific model, nor did ‘Richard’ appear in the company’s name and no one named ‘Richard’ worked there. Furthermore, his claims that “we bought [the urinal] at Mott Works on Fifth Ave”, simply cannot possibly be true given that the company had moved from its location on Fifth Avenue to New Jersey in July of 1902, 15 years before he alleged to have made the purchase, and his 1953 claim that the company “still exists” is, too, false as it had shut down in the early 1920s.17 His recollection of the events surrounding his resignation from The Society board of directors is also incorrect as, despite claiming he resigned immediately after finding Fountain behind a partition on April 12 and determining that the committee had no intention of following through on their promise of allowing anyone to submit their work, he had already written of his resignation in a letter to his sister dated April 10, the day before the exhibition opened and two days before he found the hidden urinal.18

Such confusion is easily cleared by another letter Duchamp sent to his sister, this one dated two days after Fountain was rejected on April 11, a letter that was hidden until 1982 when, 15 years after Duchamp’s death, it was published by the Archives of American Art Journal. Stating that, “Une de mes amies sous un pseudonyme masculin, Richard Mutt, avait envoyé une pissotière en porcelaine comme sculpture [One of my friends under a masculine pseudonym, Richard Mutt, sent a porcelain urinal as a sculpture]”, Duchamp himself writes a historical record of the fact that Fountain was not his creation after all.19 Furthermore, his use of the feminine “Une de mes amies” instead of the masculine ‘un de mes amis’, identifies this “friend” as a woman. Who was this female friend Duchamp credited with “send[ing] a porcelain urinal as a sculpture”? Historical evidence points to the eccentric, thieving and undeniably radical Dada artist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.

Despite being “dismissed by many as a pathetic madwoman” during her lifetime, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven was nothing short of a revolutionary who pioneered the ready-made with her creations of what she called “junk sculptures”, along with her use of her own body in performance art pieces which she introduced into her work half-a-century before ‘the body’ and ‘artist as object’ became common themes in feminist artworks by the likes of Carolee Schneemann and Hannah Wilke.20

Born Else Ploetz in what is now Poland, but was then part of the German state of Prussia, she was an artist, poet, performer and model who used her work as a form of anti-patriarchal and anti-aesthetic protest that challenged bourgeoise society’s values and beauty ideals. The extent to which she embraced her art form and her eccentricities solidified her as the epitome of Dada. Her father, Adolf, a “violent tempered, intemperate, generous, big hearted, meanly cruel, revengeful, traditionally honest in business man” was the archetype for a late-nineteenth century German patriarch, who was a domineering shadow over the family. Her mother, Ida, however, she described as “cultured and genteel” but, being from an aristocratic but impoverished Polish family, she had little in common with her husband and her years of domesticity resulted in scandalous behaviour, foreshadowing that of her daughter. “She did things nobody would think of,” von Freytag-Loringhoven stated, recalling that Ida was known to cut up the expensive material of her husband’s suits and “spoiling” it by using the fabric for unnecessary craft projects such as handkerchief holders, because, in her words, “she was tired of doing ‘fine handiwork’. Everybody could do that.” As can be expected from a creative but intellectually unstimulated woman in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, Ida was temporarily institutionalised (von Freytag-Loringhoven would also be institutionalised for the same reasons), but it is in her mother that Elsa, then still Else, was first introduced to society’s expectations for women and what it meant to rebel against them.21

Following her mother’s death, at the age of eighteen, she moved to Berlin where she lived with her aunt and split her time between working at the Wintergarten variety theatre and other “exciting activities, all of which had to do with flirtation”.22 In 1901 Else married for the first time to artist and master of Jugendstil design, August Endell, although issues in the marriage quickly became apparent which resulted in her institutionalisation for “hysteria” and their separation. In January 1903 she married again, this time to Felix Paul Greve, who was a friend of her now-ex-husband August, and together the three moved to Palermo, Italy, although Felix was soon forced to return to Germany after being charged with fraud by a former patron and subsequently sentenced to a year in prison. While awaiting her husband’s return, she penned several poems inspired by the Italian milieu she immersed herself in. After his release from prison, Else and Felix traversed through England, France and Switzerland before he had the sudden desire to establish a farm in rural Kentucky, and so they immigrated to the United States. Once arriving, ‘Else’ anglicised the spelling of her name to ‘Elsa’ and was abandoned by Felix when his farm failed, as could be predicted for someone who had no experience farming. To escape his failure, he faked his own suicide and, taking what little money they had, fled to Canada where he adopted the name Frederick Philip Grove to become one of the country’s most famous writers and tried to claim authorship over her poems she had written in Italy, despite being imprisoned at the time of their writing. Relatively unencumbered by her husband’s abandonment, Else, now Elsa, moved to Cincinnati where she settled comfortably among the city’s large German population and where she is believed to have met her third husband, Baron Leopold von Freytag-Loringhoven, from whom she received her aristocratic title. The Baron and Baroness moved to New York City in 1913, although, like her previous marriages, this, too, was ill-fated with the Baron being captured and killed by French troops while trying to return to Germany to fight in World War 1.23

Von Freytag-Loringhoven’s understanding of her father’s rigid authoritarianism being an instrument of social control and her mother’s mental illness being the result of pressure to conform to domestic duties are frequent themes of her work, as is her distain for the self-appointed purveyors of high-art. Using objects she found on the street as well as items she stole from department stores to create her art-to-wear costumes, Margaret Anderson, founder of The Little Review magazine, recalled that she “decorated her breasts with tea infusers; sported a birdcage as a necklace, a live canary its jewel; appeared naked but for two tomato cans tied across her nipples; wore postage stamps as rouge; made bracelets of curtain rings; and adorned her person with waste paper baskets, safety pins, vegetables, and cutlery.”24 Much to the horror of early twentieth-century bourgeoise society, she would promenade through the streets of New York in her wearable art, challenging Euro-American standards of beauty and femininity and enraging passers-by. A witness to one such stroll recalled her wearing a skirt onto which she had attached some sixty to eighty, “lead, tin or cast-iron toys: dolls, soldiers, automobiles, locomotives and music boxes” all likely taken from a department store shelf and shoved into her pocket before being noticed by store employees. After running into her in the Village, artist Louis Bouché recalled her wearing a peculiar dress with the bustle having been adorned with “an electric battery taillight”, when Bouché questioned the light fixture she responded, somewhat logically, “Cars and bicycles have taillights. Why not I?”25 The furor caused by the Baroness was only deepened by those who saw her on the days she carried one of her favourite accessories – a plaster cast of a penis.26 Her overt display of the penis plaster-cast not only reflects the New Woman’s transgression into historically masculine spaces, but also declares that this biologically determined guarantor of privilege was, in fact, transferrable, suggesting that so too could be the success and authority it ejected. Her “shocking” behaviour was, of course, typical of the German Dadaists’ whose particular brand of Dadaism had causing social controversy and political disturbances at its core, and, since the movement adapted to the individual circumstances of each country it entered, it is unsurprising that the German form of Dadaism didn’t land well with New York audiences, with her eccentricity and sexual liberation leaving her as an undefended target for violent projections from men and the wider bourgeoise society who were determined to force her into being the same subservient hetaera as her mother was.

Reflecting art history’s ‘man does art, woman is art’ axiom, the Baroness didn’t just do Dada, she was Dada – “she [was] the only one living anywhere who dressed Dada, loves Dada, lives Dada”, and, in 1922, she was identified by Jane Heap in The Little Review as being “the first American Dada” and the very embodiment of Dada itself.27 It could also be argued that she was one of the few New York Dadaists who truly believed in and exemplified the revolutionary spirit and dedication to destroying bourgeoise notions of meaning and order that bonded the first Dadaists in Zurich. The majority of male avant-garde artists, however, can be defined by their tendency to create radical art in their free time but continue to live traditional bourgeoise lives behind closed doors and hold staunch opinions about women’s continued role as domestic servants. These are the artists to whom the Baroness, and women like her, presented the biggest threat as they are ultimately driven by fear of the New Woman’s challenges to their perceived masculine superiority. Despite many chronicles of the early avant-garde art produced in the U.S. including vivid descriptions of her artistic practice, it is perhaps unsurprising that her total identification with every facet of the movement, especially her hatred of the bourgeoise and the fact that she was a woman in her thirties and single (shock horror!), is what led to her exclusion from its historical narrative.28 Much like the Surrealists’, whose objectification and belittlement of women in their circles would begin in the coming years, male Dada artists viewed themselves as the ultimate creator and expected women to be their muse, puppeted by their desires, instead of indulging in sexual freedoms and enjoyment of antagonising bourgeoise society which von Freytag-Loringhoven did so freely.

Woman, to Dada artists, is a mindless, bodiless, machine-like entity that is totally reliant upon man’s direction for materialisation and consummation. ‘She’ is a machine made by man as an incarnation of his own idealised image; ‘She’ submits to his every will but is incapacitated and aimless without his instruction – ‘She’ exists because of, and solely for, male desire. “That is why he loves her”, Dada writer and critic Paul Haviland declares in his statement of the woman-machine, because, “‘Her’ corporeality is only possible by the ‘He’ who is the creator”.29 Published in the November 1915 issue of the avant-garde journal, 291, Haviland’s description of the woman-machine was further explored by Francis Picabia and Marius de Zayas in the journal’s following issue wherein Picabia’s Violá Elle (1915) drawing was reproduced alongside his statement: “Here she is, an incomplete tubular machine: “she” is simply the HOLE of the target, whose reaction to the shot wad of fire from the gun initiates her own continual penetration”.30 Along with this, de Zayas’s visual poem, Femme!, (1915) was also included and reads: “A Woman! Comprising a man’s anxious desires. Her sassy arm proclaims its debt to its male author—I see … how she loves to be a straight line traced by a mechanical hand.” She is, “harebrained”, and her Dadaism is articulated through male desire for she “exists only in the exaggeration of her jouissances and in the consciousness of possession.... I see her only in pleasure”.31 The Baroness, whose phallic frolicking and feminisation of traditional masculinity was the most radical and total embodiment of Dada’s core beliefs, made no attempt to shrink herself into her male contemporaries’ idealisations of the ‘She’ who served them. Von Freytag-Loringhoven existed for herself and for her art, she, therefore “had to disappear” from history, Amelia Jones notes.32 As, “even within Dada itself, such a blatant, parodic symbolisation of the continuing (if threatened) privilege of the male artist could not be allowed. It was imperative that the New Woman … be contained within the anxiety-reducing mechanomorphic forms of the machine image, not parading freely through the streets wielding a phallus clearly detached from its conventional role as guarantor of male privilege”.33

Duchamp’s inability to further contextualise Fountain was dismissed by the art world as being the result of almost 40 years between The Society’s exhibition and when he began publicly allowing himself to be associated with the artwork. However, some scholars remained dubious of his involvement, including William Camfield, often considered one of the foremost authorities on Fountain and Duchamp’s artistic output, along with former chief curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, Kirk Varnedoe, and French art historian and critic Hector Obalk, all of who have written several studies pointing to the conclusion that Duchamp could not have been responsible for Fountain. Their research culminated in 2002 with the publishing of Irene Gammel’s Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity - A Cultural Biography, wherein Duchamp’s letter to his sister, clearly stating “one of my female friends under a masculine pseudonym, Richard Mutt, sent in a porcelain urinal as a sculpture”, first connected the Baroness to Fountain, successfully explaining how she developed the idea while or soon after constructing her sculpture God (1917) and sent it to New York from Philadelphia, where it is known to have come from and where she was living at the time, via the residence of Louise Norton, with whom both she and Duchamp were acquainted and who would later write the Buddha of the Bathroom text, closing the case on whether or not he was the creator with a definitive and undeniable “no”.34

Despite this, the transgressive feminism seen in von Freytag-Loringhoven’s brand of Dada is “still too advanced for many historians, who continue to portray her as mad or mentally ill”, likely because it is far easier for art history and its (male) writers to declare her insane than admit their history, and their male predecessors who wrote it, to be wrong.35 The unwillingness to acknowledge the facts pointing to von Freytag-Loringhoven’s creation of Fountain is exemplified in the work of writers such as Bradley Bailey who, in his 2019 article Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’: The Baroness Theory Debunked, discredits the use of Duchamp’s letter as conclusive evidence, referring to British historian Dawn Ades who had recently claimed that Gammel mistranslated the letter which, Ades claims, actually translates to “One of my female friends who had adopted the pseudonym Richard Mutt sent me a porcelain urinal as a sculpture”, instead of “sent a porcelain urinal as a sculpture”. Bailey thus concludes that this mistranslation has allowed others to use “Gammel’s findings to fashion a scenario in which the Baroness, inspired by the United States’s declaration of war on Germany on 6th April, sent a urinal from Philadelphia to the Independents exhibition in New York to proclaim her distaste for both America’s entrance into the war and the Independents alike”.36 Given that neither Ades nor Bailey speak French, or have any experience translating the language to English, it is understandable that they have not seen their own mistranslations, the first of which is seen in “aimes”, which translates only to ‘friends’, not ‘female friends’ as they assert, and the friend can be identified as being a female only due to the French language’s use of grammatical gender. Given that English is not a gendered language, when translated, this simply reads “one of my friends”.37

The second mistranslation made by Ades and repeated unchecked by Bailey is the inclusion of the phrase “who had adopted the pseudonym”, which has been translated from Duchamp’s “sous un pseudonyme masculin”. When translated into English correctly, this reads, “under a masculine pseudonym”, and nowhere in his letter does Duchamp use ‘qui avait adopté le pseudonyme masculin’ as would be required for Ades translation. While this may seem pedantic, Ades mistranslation may, in fact, be the intentional erasure of Duchamp’s explicitly stating the pseudonym was masculine, making way for the suggestion that “mes amies” was simply a mistake and he had actually meant the masculine ‘mes aims’, which would then allow for the argument that the gender of the friend was the same as that of the pseudonym, implying that it was Duchamp all along.

The third mistranslation, on which Ades’s and Bailey’s entire argument rests, is that of “avait envoyé une pissotière en porcelaine” being mistranslated to “sent me a porcelain urinal”. If it were possible to be translated to as such Duchamp would have had to use the past tense possessive pronoun ‘m’a’ which, in this context, would have been written as ‘avait m’a envoyé une’, or the contracted ‘m’avait envoyé une’. Therefore, given that Duchamp has not used any possessive pronoun, this phrase could not be correctly translated to ‘sent me’ as Ades has attempted and can only be translated to ‘had sent a’. Additionally, in his letter Duchamp made no indication that the urinal was sent to The Society as per his instruction or on his behalf. Such a request would be read as ‘en mon nom’ (in my name), ‘sous mon autorité’ (under my authority), ‘j’ai elle donné l’autorité de’ (I gave her authority to), ‘comme je elle ai demandé’ (as I requested), ‘j’ai elle demandé’ (I asked her), etc. all of which cannot be found.

Furthermore, what Bailey fails to mention is that Duchamp’s letter was not translated by Gammel, as Ades had claimed, but by Dada historian and scholar Francis Naumann for his 1982 article Affectueusement, Marcel: Ten Letters from Marcel Duchamp to Suzanne Duchamp and Jean Crotti, wherein it was first revealed that Duchamp had not been the mastermind behind Fountain through translations of several of his letters from French to English by a team of five writers, historians and translators, including the French writer and translator, Patrice Lefrançois.38 Given that Lefrançois is both a professional translator and native French speaker, one would be hard pressed to successfully argue his translation to be incorrect in favour of Ades.

In his 2022 article Dada Meets Dixieland: Marcel Duchamp Explains Fountain, Bailey asserts that, while “The need for greater clarity is not entirely without merit”, the “inconsistencies in Duchamp’s retellings of the narrative have made it difficult to construct a clear picture of the events that shape the history of Fountain”, and that inconsistencies in Duchamp’s memory have “been manipulated to contribute to the justification of an argument questioning Duchamp’s involvement in the creation of the work”. Barring the fact that Bailey has made his own inconsistencies and manipulations of history, ignoring that it was Naumann, not Gammel, who translated Duchamp’s letters, done with the explicit purpose of furthering his argument that the Baroness couldn’t have been responsible for Fountain, his indolence and failure to undertake any significant and independent research is exemplified in his statement that “This theory has recently been discredited”, for which he cites himself instead of any scholars who have peer-reviewed his article that supposedly debunked the theory, or who have made similar investigations into the topic.39

Through understanding the research of Naumann, Gammel, Spalding and Thompson, as well as recognition of Duchamp’s lack of interaction with the sculpture, one can undoubtedly conclude that Duchamp had far less to do with the creation of Fountain than he claimed later in his life. However, this alone is not enough to definitively attribute the artwork to a specific person, such an effort can only be made through a further examination of Alfred Stieglitz’s photograph of the original Fountain, after which, it becomes clear that the Baroness is the most likely artist responsible for its creation. The first newspaper to report on the Fountain debacle was an April 17 New York Herald article, wherein it was first reported to have originated in Philadelphia.

Stieglitz’s photographgives two clues as to who the sculpture’s creator could be, the first is seen on the tag hanging from the urinal’s left installation bracket, on which, the address of the fictional Richard Mutt is given as “110 West 88th Street”. Some writers have attempted to make the claim that, because this was the address of Louise Norton, who wrote the Buddha of the Bathroom text that accompanied Stieglitz’s photograph in The Blind Man, she is, therefore, the only other person possibly responsible for Fountain.40 In actual fact, while she did live at that address, in her husband Edgard Varese’s biography Norton noted that in April 1917 she occupied the first floor of the building, she was renting the second floor to the French artists Albert Gliezes and Juliette Roche, and the third floor was also occupied, possibly Norton’s mother who owned the building, although no name was given in the biography.41 While at least three people other than Norton were also in residence at 110 West 88th Street, two of which were prominent artists themselves, this fact is often omitted by those attempting to insert her further into the narrative than she belongs, as Ades and Bailey both did in their respective articles. Also noted by Norton is that in April 1917 she employed a housekeeper, Mrs. Kiernan, who is believed to have been born in 1852. This is important to note as it opens the discussion to evidence that it was she who wrote “Fountain” and “110 West 88th Street” on the sculpture’s tag, as evidenced by the round script writing which was not taught in private or public schools beyond the 1890s when Louise would have been taught to write, but it would have been taught to Mrs. Kiernan. Such a hypothesis was made by Glyn Thompson in response to Bailey’s failed ‘debunking’ of his theory, stating that, “to Mrs. Kiernan, the housekeeper of Irish descent, what arrived without a label at 110 West 88th Street was, inarguably, a fualän – a urinal [in her native Irish]; but by the time it left the same address attached to a label completed in Mrs. Kiernan’s round hand it had become, inarguably, a fuarán – a fountain”.42

The second clue given in Stieglitz’s photograph is the most obvious – the ‘R. Mutt’ signature. When comparing the handwriting of this signature with that of Duchamp it becomes inarguable that he most certainly did not write on this urinal, and when examining the Baroness’s handwriting, she can easily be identified as the writer. This can clearly be seen in a 2022 exhibition of the Baroness’s work at London’s Mimosa House gallery which featured an image of Fountain projected onto a door with a section of the Baroness’s poem, Graveyard, printed in her handwriting on the wall next to it.

Most obvious to this analysis is that the Baroness uses all capital letters whereas Duchamp’s handwriting is cursive, although far less round than what is seen in Mrs. Kiernan’s handwriting on the label, but further inspection of several other key areas confirms that it is a far closer match to her handwriting. In the letter Duchamp sent to his sister, in which he confirmed that he did not send in the urinal, he wrote that it was sent using the “pseudonym, Richard Mutt”, and in doing so, gives us a clear example of his writing of the name which we can use for comparison – Duchamp used an uppercase ‘R’ for ‘Richard’ but a lowercase ‘m’ for ‘mutt’ and neither the ‘R’ nor ‘m’ match the lettering of the urinal’s signature, as the ‘R’ is far more rounded on the right side and the leg curves before going back up and joining the next letter, and the ‘m’ of Duchamp’s hand includes a hook leading into the top of the left side. Between these two letters we can also see that the spacing is far closer together than Duchamp usually allows. Additionally, the letter ‘U’ in the signature is made with a single curved line and does not drop back down to the base or connect to the next letter, as is seen in Duchamp’s handwriting elsewhere, and, when using the letters ‘T’, Duchamp makes a slight curve before the right side drops down slightly. Finally, a significant difference can be seen in the angle of the writing. Where Duchamp writes on an angle with his rounded letters slightly tilting to the right, as was traditionally taught to students at the prestigious Lycée Pierre-Corneille secondary school he attended, the signature on the urinal is upright with very little tilt.

Comparatively, in the Baroness’s handwriting we can see stark similarities to R. Mutt’s signature, as well as direct matches. Not only did she use all capital letters when writing her poems, correspondences and her initials, she also used the same ‘R’ that is seen on the urinal and, while she does tend to add a slight curve to the top of her ‘M’s, several of her poems feature the same angular ‘M’ seen on the urinal with the spacing between the ‘R. M’ being equivalent to the spacing she allows between her letters. Her letter ‘U’ is constructed with the same single curved line and her letter ‘T’ uses the same two straight lines that are seen on the urinal. Finally, the Baroness’s lettering stands upright and has the same sharp, angular shape.

We can also compare Duchamp’s signature he left on his other artworks, all of which he produced as replicas in his late life and all of which he signed with his name or his alias, Rrose Sélavy. On the back of Why Not Sneeze Rrose Selavy (1921) we can see Duchamp’s signature clearly written in the same cursive hand seen in his various signatures and letters, including the one sent to his sister on April 11 and, in a signed portrait of Rrose Sélavy, we can see the same cursive handwriting. If, then, he was unconcerned with changing his writing for the signature of his feminine alter-ego, it would be strange of him to do so for the signature of Richard Mutt, an alias that, if indeed was Duchamp, he never used again.

With the vast amount of evidence certifying Duchamp could not have been responsible for Fountain, one would be naturally inclined to question why his false narrative is still perpetuated by scholars and taught to students. However, Ades’s and Bailey’s mistranslations and refusal to present any new, or even correct, scholarship on the topic points to a much larger issue in the work of contemporary historians and institutions and explains exactly why there is so much resistance to the Baroness. The historical canon that the likes of Ades and Bailey attempt to solidify will tell us that Duchamp was the first to use every-day and found objects for his sculptures beginning with Bicycle in 1913. But Pablo Picasso did this a year earlier with his use of discarded paper to construct Guitar (1912) and Bottle of Vieux Marc, Glass, Guitar and Newspaper (1913), and Mary Delany (1700-88) was pioneering a similar process of making collages from paper she found and repurposed into floral arrangements in the early eighteenth century. Von Freytag-Loringhoven, too, was making artworks similarly constructed out of found objects at the same time Duchamp was beginning to, as seen in her Enduring Ornament (1913), a small metal band she found near a construction site which she determined was an artwork and added to her collection.

Unfortunate as it may be, her history of having men claim credit for her artworks is quite possibly the best rebuttal for the inevitable question of how such an act could go unnoticed – Morton Schamberg taking sole authorship of her 1917 sculpture God meant that she had no previous major work that could attest to her having the artistic ability and knowledge that would lead to her making the similar Fountain sculpture, and society’s inability to understand her “junk sculptures” as anything other than evidence of her “craziness”, meant that she and her work was not taken seriously – a perplexity that remains.43 Not only did Schamberg assume credit for God, Duchamp himself later attempted to do so when he moved the sculpture from its original position and placed it among his own ready-mades while installing the Arensberg Collection display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1954.44

We can only guess what history would say had she asserted her authorship of God and had she not been considered ‘crazy’, but, even if this was the case, it is unlikely she would have played a larger role in history due to her return to Germany and shortened life. By the time Fountain started to gain recognition for its role in reshaping Modern art, von Freytag-Loringhoven was already dead, and, as we know, history records not who did something first or who initiated an idea, but who knew the people responsible for recording it and was able to tilt the pen in their favour, or who had the most fame and notoriety. She, however, was unable to take credit for her work in either of these ways. While feminist interventions into the history of art have succeeded in correcting the misattribution of some artworks, such as Judith Leyster’s paintings, in the case of Fountain, there is also an added layer of the political and economic investment that has since been made into Duchamp’s myth.

As Julian Spalding and Glyn Thompson note, in addition to the countless artistic, curatorial and academic theories of Conceptual and Modern art that have been based upon Duchamp’s false narrative, “national pride is at stake, for Conceptual art was America’s contribution to Modernism, supposedly dating from 1917, not the 1960s when Duchamp’s work began to weave its spell”.45 Given that in the 1950s and 1960s, when Duchamp first began to take credit and proclaim the importance of Fountain, the Cold War was in full swing and the U.S. was looking for any reason to maintain the power they had found after establishing themselves as the centre of culture in the postwar world, it is difficult to imagine that this power would be relinquished back to Europe, as would be the case if the sculpture was attributed to the then newly immigrated, and exceedingly European in name and nature, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, rather than the assimilated and Americanized Marcel Duchamp. Doing so would support the theory that ‘Mutt’ is derived from ‘armut’, but, still, an explanation for how Duchamp knew this translation would be needed and, ultimately, this means correcting the narrative of Fountain being not an icon of anti-art or anti-aesthetic, as asserted by Duchamp and those championing his myth, but an icon of artistic protest against poverty and a war that was then being waged in Europe, thus admitting Europe’s affairs to be of prime importance to the U.S.

The notion of being rejected and cast aside only to persevere and prevail, also reflects fundamental elements of the idealised nature of the American people that was being projected to the world at this time, and such a tale is much more inspiring than the truth that Fountain was rejected because, as noted in a newspaper article just six days after the exhibition opened, the artist, “Mr Mutt”, who sent the urinal to The Society, “failed to complete the application process, and submit his $6 along with his urinal” and because it was delivered to the Grand Central Palace, “three weeks after the submission deadline”.46 This places even further doubt on Duchamp who was not only a founding member of The Society, and therefore highly unlikely to forget that all artworks would be accepted providing the artist was a member and that they be received, along with the $6 submission fee, by the May 21 deadline. Removing any possibility that he simply forgot or overlooked these crucial details, Duchamp had ensured an artwork by his brother, Jacques Duchamp, was properly submitted, complete with the submission fee and received before the deadline, which was thus included the exhibition.47

Added to this political motivation of keeping Fountain firmly in the oeuvre of Duchamp, is the sheer amount of money that has been injected into the sculpture itself as well as the abundance of art and movements reflecting its anti-art and anti-aesthetic notions, including Conceptual art, Abstraction and Abstract Expressionism, Fluxus, Pop Art and various others of twentieth-century Modernism. Since Duchamp made his Fountain replicas in the 1950s and 1960s, their price tag has far exceeded the original $20,000 and, as the false narrative of their history and subsequent impact continues to be perpetuated, the cost continues to rise. In 1999, Greek art collector Dimitri Daskalopolos purchased the fifth of the eight 1964 replicas for $1,700,000 USD (equivalent to $3,241,540 USD in 2025) and, that same year, London’s Tate Modern Museum purchased a replica for $500,000 USD (equivalent to $953,349 USD in 2025). The Modernist art that Fountain validated has also been highly sought after with Andy Warhol’s Liz (1963) portrait selling for $1,900,000 USD (equivalent to $3,622,898 USD in 2025) and Mark Rothko’s No.15 (1952) painting fetching $11,000,000 USD (equivalent to $20,974,675 USD in 2025), both at the same 1999 Sotheby’s auction where Daskalopolos purchased his Fountain.48 More recently, Duchamp’s replica of Belle Haleine – Eau de Voilette (1921) sold in Paris in 2009 for €8,913,000 (equivalent to €12,664,845 in 2025) and L.H.O.O.Q (1919, 1958 replica), what would be considered graffiti if it were from anyone else’s hand, sold in 2019 for €922,000 (equivalent to €1,140,842 in 2025).49 Even artworks that are a tribute to Fountain see high prices such as Sherrie Levaine’s Fountain (After Marcel Duchamp) which sold at auction in 2012 for $962,500 USD (equivalent to $1,331,734 USD in 2025).50 After purchasing his Fountain replica, Daskalopolos explained the hysteria the sculpture’s false narrative brings about, stating, “for me, it represents the origins of contemporary art”.51

Acknowledging that it was von Freytag-Loringhoven, not Duchamp, who created the sculpture will not undo these sales, and it certainly will not diminish the importance of Fountain to the history and development of art. It would, however, recognise that the people who have written these narratives have often done so with extreme bias and it would encourage further exploration into history to uncover other injustices and false narratives, leading to an understanding of how history can, and has been, manipulated for the benefit of patriarchal societies. As Spalding and Thompson stressed, “the public has a right to believe what it reads on a museum label”, after all, it is within the hallowed museum that our tangible history has been collected, preserved and displayed for the public’s education and since its inception, we have been conditioned to believe the information we are given on labels to be true and given to us without bias. It is for this reason they declared that museums around the world with Fountain replicas in their collection, “should all re-label their copies of Fountain as “a replica, appropriated by Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), of an original by Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874-1927)”.”52 Although, with these and other museums who perpetuate such false narratives all snubbing the extensive research that has encouraged them to admit their inaccuracies, it is difficult to remain optimistic and trusting of their label’s contents. Such naiveté is disallowed by the abundance of resources and research, no longer only accessible to the wealthy and connected.

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