Fountain

In 1917, Marcel Duchamp went to a store that sold bathroom parts.

He bought a urinal, signed it with a fake name, called it Fountain, and submitted it to an art show.

People were angry because you know a urinal, a urinal isn't art.

This is one of those moments in our history where I had to turn off my judgment part of my brain, had to turn on art appreciation because Duchamp wasn't telling a joke.

His next step would also test the definitions of art and what could be accepted into an art exhibition with his introduction of what he called the readymade.

In 1917, he entered his sculpture Fountain into another major art show in New York.

Fountain was a mass-produced urinal turned on its side and signed with a pseudonym, R. Mutt.

As Duchamp himself described a readymade, it's an object without needing an artist to make it because it's an object that's selected with aesthetic indifference, meaning he didn't want it to be beautiful or ugly because once you've done that, it would enter into the realm of taste, which is exactly what he was trying to avoid.

If you think of art as just something to be looked at and not thought about, that's the perfect condition to encounter for the first time a readymade, which challenges that definition completely, top to bottom, since it's an object that didn't require any craftsmanship or handmaking, which people assume all artworks have to be.

Up to Fountain, Duchamp's readymades, which he had been making for three or four years by then, were all kind of non-interesting objects: a bicycle wheel attached to a kitchen stool.

Mm-hmm.

A bottle rack, a dog comb.

You need to pick up a bunch of bananas 'cause you're making smoothies tomorrow for breakfast, and it is that common item that now hangs in a gallery and is fine art.

I loved that when I saw that piece, and then later in the weekend, we were looking at The Fountain, Marcel Duchamp's urinal.

Yeah.

Right?

Narrated for Arva.

Marcel Duchamp's Fountain is not for everyone, and it does not need to be.

But it does encapsulate a central concern in the philosophy of art.

What makes something art, and who gets to decide? Whatever our tastes, art can challenge accepted systems and make us reconsider what we think we know.

Duchamp's friend and chess partner John Cage observed in 1988, "...I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas.

I'm frightened of the old ones." Fountain embodies this thinking.

A version of Fountain is part of the Philadelphia Museum of Art's permanent collection and will appear in the museum's upcoming Duchamp Retrospective, which opens October 10, 2026 and runs through January 31, 2027. the exhibition will revisit Duchamp's enduring questions about what art is and what it can be.

As an art historian and former Philadelphia Museum of Art staff lecturer, I have developed an intimate knowledge of Duchamp's art through years of teaching his work.

And then there was like the next wave of revolutionary art.

And the one that always comes to mind is like Duchamp and the Ready Maids and like Fountain and the Peace Fountain.

And if you don't know, the ready-mades were kind of like at the turn of the 20th century.

And Duchamp's fountain is a urinal.

And there have been plenty of other artists who've played with the boundaries of originality by centering the idea rather than the art itself.

Like French artist Marcel Duchamp, who in 1917 took a porcelain urinal, tipped it on its side, and declared it a sculpture titled Fountain.

He even signed a fake artist's name on it, prompting us to imagine that someone named R. Mutt had constructed it.

Duchamp submitted the work to a show put on by the Society of Independent Artists.

You've absolutely seen it.

You don't know what Fountain is.

But he...

There was... an art exhibition and he, under the pseudonym R. Mutt, submitted a urinal that he flipped 90 degrees.