In April 1917, the Society of Independent Artists held its first exhibition at the Grand Central Palace in New York. The Society had been founded the previous December on the principle that there would be no jury and no prizes. Anyone who paid the membership fee of six dollars could submit two works, and the Society pledged to exhibit every submission.

On 9 April, a wooden crate arrived at the exhibition hall. Inside was a porcelain urinal of the kind manufactured by the J. L. Mott Iron Works on Fifth Avenue. It had been turned on its back, signed in black paint with the name "R. Mutt" and the date 1917, and labelled as the entry "Fountain" by R. Mutt of Philadelphia. The six-dollar submission fee had been paid.

The Society's board met in private. The board removed the urinal from the floor, never displayed it, and never returned it. The exhibition ran for several weeks. Many of the artists who had submitted lesser-known work to the Society were now exhibited; the Fountain was not. R. Mutt did not collect his urinal.

Who Was R. Mutt

R. Mutt was Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp was a French painter who had moved to New York in 1915 to escape the war. He had already become known for the painting Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2, which had caused a scandal at the 1913 New York Armory Show. By 1917, he was one of the founding members of the Society of Independent Artists and on its board of directors.

The Fountain submission was a test. Duchamp wanted to know whether the Society would actually honour its pledge to exhibit every submission, or whether the no-jury principle was a pose. He used the pseudonym R. Mutt (a play on the Mott Iron Works manufacturer's name and on the contemporary Mutt and Jeff cartoon strip) so that the board would not know it was him. He paid the six dollars from his own pocket. He waited to see what would happen.

The board (which did not know R. Mutt was Duchamp) voted to suppress the entry by a narrow margin. The arguments were that the urinal was vulgar, that it was plagiarism (since Duchamp had not made it), and that it was simply not art. The vote was not unanimous; several board members (notably Walter Arensberg, a key Duchamp patron) voted to keep it.

Duchamp resigned from the board immediately. He had not announced himself as the artist. He resigned on the grounds that the Society had failed its founding principle. Within days, the news that Fountain had been suppressed was circulating in New York art circles.

The Photograph

The original urinal disappeared shortly after the suppression. It was almost certainly thrown away. What survives is a photograph taken by Alfred Stieglitz at his 291 Gallery, sometime after the suppression. Duchamp had taken the urinal to Stieglitz, set it up against a painted backdrop (a painting by Marsden Hartley was used as the background), and asked Stieglitz to photograph it. The photograph was published in a small art journal called The Blind Man in May 1917.

The Blind Man article that accompanied the photograph included an editorial defending Fountain. The argument was simple: "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 — created a new thought for that object."

The editorial was probably written by Duchamp himself, with the help of Beatrice Wood and Henri-Pierre Roché. It is the first explicit theoretical defence of the readymade as a category in art. The argument compresses what Duchamp had been working on for several years: that the act of selection, in art, was equivalent to the act of making.

The Readymades

Duchamp had begun making what he called "readymades" in 1913. The first was a bicycle wheel mounted on a stool. He had also made (and destroyed) a number of others before Fountain: a bottle rack, a snow shovel inscribed In Advance of the Broken Arm. The principle was always the same. He selected an ordinary manufactured object. He named it and signed it. He declared it to be art.

The argument behind the readymades had several layers. The most obvious was that the artist's act was the act of selection, not the act of making. The deeper layer was about the question of what constitutes an art object at all. If a urinal could be art when selected and signed, then the conditions that made other things art (the painter's labour, the marble carving, the aesthetic judgment) could be analysed and questioned.

The Fountain suppression made these arguments visible in public for the first time. Before 1917, the readymades had been private studio works. After 1917, they were the centrepiece of an ongoing argument about the nature of art that has not yet been settled.

What Happened to the Urinal

The original Fountain disappeared, almost certainly thrown out by the Society staff after the exhibition closed. Duchamp commissioned several replicas over the next fifty years. The first replica, made in 1950 for an exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York, is now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. A 1964 edition of eight replicas, made under Duchamp's supervision by the Galerie Schwarz in Milan, is now distributed across major museums: the Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou, the Indiana University Art Museum, and several private collections.

The 1964 replicas are based on the Stieglitz photograph rather than the original urinal, since the original had been lost. The replicas are slightly larger than the original would have been and use a different model of porcelain urinal. They are nonetheless "the Fountain" in the institutional sense: Duchamp authorised them, the museums treat them as the work, the historical record refers to them as Fountain.

What the Suppression Established

The Society's suppression of Fountain was a public failure of the no-jury principle. The Society went on for several years (its annual exhibitions continued through the 1920s), but it never again claimed to be an open society. The pretence had been tested and broken.

The argument that the suppression made possible was larger. Duchamp's Fountain, and the readymade principle behind it, became the founding move of conceptual art. The line that runs from Fountain through Dada, through Pop Art, through Conceptualism, through institutional critique, and into much of the contemporary art of the past sixty years, starts in April 1917.

The 2004 survey of British art professionals, organised by Turner Prize patrons, voted Fountain the most influential artwork of the twentieth century. The vote was about a urinal that was never actually exhibited and was thrown out within weeks.

Duchamp Afterwards

Duchamp made no paintings after 1923 and (apparently) very little art of any kind after the late 1920s. He had publicly declared himself bored with painting. He spent the next forty years playing chess at competitive level, writing chess columns for newspapers, and making occasional small works in private. He maintained that he had retired from art.

The retirement was a pose. From 1946 to 1966, Duchamp secretly worked on a single large installation, Étant donnés, a 3-D tableau viewed through a peephole in a wooden door, showing a nude female figure in a landscape. He worked on it in a studio in New York that nobody knew about. He left it to the Philadelphia Museum of Art at his death in 1968. The museum installed it according to his instructions, and it has been on display since.

The Étant donnés revealed that the most influential conceptualist of the twentieth century had spent his official retirement years secretly making a single large object. The retirement had been a strategy. The argument Duchamp had begun in 1917 (about the conditions under which a thing becomes art) was being conducted, in his own studio, for another fifty years.