The lost object that conquered the century

Here is the fact that catches almost everyone out: there is no original. The 1917 urinal is lost. So when you see Fountain in a museum, in London or Philadelphia or San Francisco, you are looking at a later, authorized copy. Duchamp sanctioned a string of full-size reproductions over the decades. In 1950 the dealer Sidney Janis bought a urinal at a Paris flea market and Duchamp signed it; that one went to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In 1963 Ulf Linde made a version in Stockholm with Duchamp’s blessing. And in 1964, the Milan gallerist Arturo Schwarz fabricated an edition of eight, plus proofs, made to scaled drawings and signed by Duchamp. Counting all of them, about seventeen versions of Fountain now exist. The original is not among them.

The Schwarz copies are not even quite the same material as the thing they replace. The lost original was porcelain; the 1964 replicas are glazed earthenware, painted to resemble porcelain, with the “R. Mutt 1917” signature reproduced in black. So the museum object is a careful imitation, in a different clay, of a photograph of a thing that was thrown away. And those imitations are now treated as treasures. The Tatein London bought replica 2 of 8 in 1999; at the same Sotheby’s sale that year, another of the eight changed hands for well over a million dollars. Authorized copies of a discarded urinal command the prices of masterpieces, which is its own quiet last joke on the whole question of where value comes from.

For something hidden in 1917 and lost soon after, Fountain’s reach is hard to overstate. In a 2004 poll, five hundred British art-world professionals named it the most influential artwork of the twentieth century, ahead of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. The reason is the idea it planted. Fountain is routinely called the foundation stone of Conceptual art, the art that lives in ideas rather than objects, and the direct ancestor of a great deal that followed: Andy Warhol and Pop art’s embrace of the mass-produced, Minimalism’s plain industrial objects, the found object dropped into a gallery and called a work. Each of them runs on the permission Duchamp took here, that the choosing is the art.

And the absence at the center never quite goes away. The thing itself is gone. What survives is a single photograph, an unsigned editorial, a handful of replicas in a different clay, and a question that will not close. That, in the end, is exactly the shape of what Fountain argued: not that a urinal is beautiful, but that art was never really in the object at all. It was in the choice, and the choice outlived the thing.