110 years of the “readymade”: a not so happy anniversary?

Note: the following text was drafted for a generalist publication but went unused.

The year 2025 marks a special anniversary in art history: 110 years since the inauguration of the term “readymade”. The word, borrowed from the fashion industry, was repurposed by the French artist Marcel Duchamp in 1915 and applied to manufactured objects displayed as artworks.¹ In this role, it describes a genre that has since become almost ubiquitous in the modern gallery.

But no name day celebrations for this now-venerable art form can mask that it lies at the centre of a simmering debate, one now bubbling over from academic speculation into mainstream discussion. The fundamental question is simple: to whom should the the most significant readymade really be attributed? But at stake are the reputations of scholars, and the judgement of history on whether a century of art historical narrative in fact rests on sexism and theft.

The dispute revolves around one artwork: 1917’s Fountain, an early readymade once named “the most influential modern artwork of all time”.² The piece consists simply of a bought porcelain urinal, altered only by the addition of the signature “R. Mutt”.

For such an important work, Fountain’s existence was rather ephemeral: it was refused a place at the only exhibition to which it was ever submitted on the grounds that it was not an artwork and was “indecent”. Soon after the object was forever lost to history–but not, crucially, before being photographed by Alfred Stieglitz:³

Stieglitz’s photograph and the incident it represented slowly gained notoriety, and Fountain would eventually come to be seen as having pioneered the intrusion of mass produced objects into the traditional domain of art, a phenomenon which would proliferate as the century advanced.

But Fountain had begun with a lie: submitted under the name of R. Mutt, it the work of no such person. Instead, the piece has long been credited to Marcel Duchamp, who had discretely told his close cricle that he was behind the stunt (and, decades later, would openly commission replicas of the urinal for retrospective exhibitions of his work).

In an early letter, however, Duchamp displayed a reticence over the authorship which is at first surprising given the intended reader. To his sister Suzanne, he wrote in 1917 that “a female friend” was in fact the person responsible for submitting Fountain.⁴ This statement came to the attention of Irene Gammel, a scholar of gender and modernism, in writing her 2002 biography of the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874-1927).⁵ “The Baroness”, as she is usually known, was an overlooked contemporary of Duchamp whose storied life and career were long neglected in art history. Connecting Duchamp’s written disavowal of authorship with an early rumour that “R. Mutt” lived in Philadelphia, (home state to Freytag-Loringhoven), Gammel plausibly conjectured that the real actor in the Fountain case may have been the Baroness herself.

However, Gammel struck a reserved tone, admitting that “final evidence” is lacking.⁶ After all, the Baroness (who of all things was not shy) never claimed authorship, even though the urinal was being publicly associated with Duchamp in print by 1919 at the latest.⁷ In academic circles, the discussion largely halted here, an interesting conjecture without positive evidence.

Within a few years, however, the case would dramatically be taken up by Glyn Thompson, formerly of the University of Leeds.

Thompson has quickly become a driving force behind what has become known as “the Baroness theory”. His argumentation is brashly assertive and often entertaining; a common theme in his writing on Fountain is an appeal not to the authority of art historiography but the nitty gritty of plumbing details specific to urinals. In keeping with this spirit he has published largely outside the avenues of academic art history: the piece which most handily summarises his position on Fountain, for example, is an essay in the trade magazine Plumbing & Mechanical.⁸ He has also been insistent that Fountain was stolen by Duchamp, and that the work should instead be recognised not only as a piece by the Baroness, but also as “the first great feminist work of art”.⁹

These factors–the bold, iconoclastic tone, the unfussy venues in which his work appears, and the apparently zealous feminist mission–have evidently endeared Thompson’s writing to many outside academe, and kept the flame burning for the Baroness theory. In 2019, for example, he was cited in an article for the Guardian newspaper under the headline “A woman in the men’s room: when will the art world recognise the real artist behind Duchamp’s Fountain?”, and recent blog posts which mention Fountain as a work by Duchamp attract eager “correction” from users in the comments.¹⁰

But the same factors which have attracted some to Thompson’s claims have, however, tended to put off academics from engaging seriously with his ideas. For example, at times the strident writing has, according to some scholars, been “belligerently abusive” in its treatment of art historians.¹¹ Further, the platforms which publish his work are not peer-reviewed, and indeed, if one focuses on the detail of the evidence marshalled to support these judgements, they seem less secure than the author’s tone might imply.

A characteristic example comes in a piece with the provocative title “More Duchamp Falsehoods Revealed”.¹² Here he accuses one art historian of “legerdemain” (that is, sleight of hand, i.e. dishonesty) in saying that Duchamp’s readymade Trebuchet (1917, also known as Trap), consisting of a hat and coat rack, was an object from Paris; rather, Thompson writes, it was produced and obtained by Duchamp in the United States.¹³ Given in partial support of Thompson’s assertion is photographic and advertisement evidence of a very similar rack produced in Indiana.¹⁴ However, there are subtle but clear differences in the design of the two racks, which are visible despite the poor quality of the surviving original photograph of Trebuchet, and these go unmentioned by Thompson.¹⁵

Many other claims by him have been disputed. Dawn Ades, a biographer of Duchamp, has worked with her publisher Alastair Brotchie in exhaustively writing corrective letters to the magazines which have published Thompson. Importantly, she has also challenged what may have been Thompson’s most impactful “discovery”–that the urinal of Fountain could not have been purchased at the New York foundry where Duchamp claimed to have obtained it. Ades highlights that this claim is based on a very questionable reading of a catalogue from the foundry in question that was printed in 1908, rather than 1917.¹⁶

Nonetheless, correctives such as these have scarcely broken through into popular discourse in the same way as the Baroness theory. As Ades writes, it has become a “matter of proving a negative, which is much harder to do”. Claims for the baroness theory, far from bringing clarity, have so far served to muddy the water of art history.

Ades, Dawn, and Alastair Brotchie. 2019. ‘MARCEL DUCHAMP WAS NOT A THIEF’, Atlas Press <https://web.archive.org/web/20230424183855/https://atlaspress.co.uk/marcel-duchamp-was-not-a-thief/> [accessed 31 December 2024]

Duchamp, Marcel. 1918. Marcel Duchamp’s 67th Street Studio, 1917 - 1918 (Francis M. Naumann Fine Art) <https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artwork/90312/Marcel-Duchamp-Marcel-Duchamp-s-67th-Street-Studio>

Duchamp. 2000. Affectionately, Marcel: The Selected Correspondence Of Marcel Duchamp, ed. by Francis Naumann (Ludion)

‘Duchamp’s Urinal Tops Art Survey’. 2004. BBC News <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4059997.stm> [accessed 10 June 2021]

Gammel, Irene. 2002. Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity : A Cultural Biography (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press) [accessed 31 December 2024]

Hustvedt, Siri. 2019. ‘A Woman in the Men’s Room: When Will the Art World Recognise the Real Artist behind Duchamp’s Fountain?’, The Guardian (The Guardian) <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/mar/29/marcel-duchamp-fountain-women-art-history> [accessed 31 December 2024]

Macy, Laura Williams. 2015. ‘Ready-Made’, Grove Art Online (Macmillan) <doi.org10.1093/gao/9781884446054.article.T070990>

Marshall, Colin. 2024. ‘How Marcel Duchamp Signed a Urinal in 1917 & Redefined Art’, Open Culture (Openculture.com) <https://www.openculture.com/2024/08/how-marcel-duchamp-signed-a-urinal-in-1917-redefined-art.html> [accessed 31 December 2024]

Picabia, Francis (ed.). 1919. 391

Stieglitz, Alfred, and Marcel Duchamp. 1917. ‘Fountain’ <https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dd/Marcel_Duchamp%2C_1917%2C_Fountain%2C_photograph_by_Alfred_Stieglitz.jpg>

Thompson, Glyn. 2018. ‘THE URINAL THAT PRECIPITATED MODERN ART’, Plumbing & Mechanical; Troy (United States–US; New York; Egypt; United Kingdom–UK; New Jersey; Tennessee; China, United States, Troy: BNP Media), p. 98,100,102

Thompson, Glyn. 2021. ‘More Duchamp Falsehoods Revealed’, The Jackdaw, pp. 22–24

Thompson, Glyn, and Julian Spalding. 2015. ‘A Lady’s Not A Gent’s - Summerhall, Edinburgh’, Summerhall, Edinburgh (Summerhall) <https://www.summerhall.co.uk/visual-arts/a-ladys-not-a-gents/> [accessed 31 December 2024]

Some photos from a research trip to Munich.

Some photos from a research trip to Munich.