The show that promised to refuse nothing

In the spring of 1917, a group of New York artists opened a brand-new exhibition with a deliberately radical rule. The Society of Independent Artists modeled itself on the French Société des Artistes Indépendants, and it made a single, ringing promise: no jury, no prizes. There would be no panel of experts deciding what was good enough to hang. Anyone who paid the fee, six dollars (a one-dollar initiation plus five dollars of dues), could exhibit anything they liked, and it would be shown. The first exhibition opened on 10 April 1917 at the Grand Central Palace in Manhattan. It was meant to be the most open art show in America.

Marcel Duchamp(1887–1968), a French artist who had moved to New York two years earlier and was already notorious for his fractured, machine-like paintings, sat on the Society’s board and ran its hanging committee. He had, in other words, helped write the no-jury rule. And he decided to test it. Under a fake name, he submitted the least “artistic” object he could think of.

The entry came in signed “R. Mutt” and titled Fountain. It was an ordinary urinal, a mass-produced porcelain plumbing fixture, laid on its back. Duchamp later said the name was a small joke stacked on a small joke: “Mutt comes from Mott Works,” the J. L. Mott Iron Works, a famous New York plumbing maker, which he twisted to “Mutt” with a wink at the popular comic strip Mutt and Jeff; and “R.” was for Richard, French slang for a man with money. (Whether the fixture actually came from Mott is, it turns out, disputed, but that was Duchamp’s stated source.)

The show had no jury. That was its whole point. So Fountain could not be, and was not, formally “rejected.” What happened instead was quieter and, in its way, worse for the Society: the board suppressed it. The object was put out of sight, hidden behind a partition, and never shown to the public, even though the rules guaranteed acceptance to anyone who paid the fee. The Society broke its one promise the moment that promise was inconvenient.

Duchamp, who had submitted the urinal anonymously precisely to see whether the “anything goes” pledge was real, now had his answer. He resigned from the board in protest. The scandal was not that a urinal had been turned away by a panel of judges. It was that a show which swore it had no judges had quietly judged anyway. The whole episode was an experiment, and the Society had failed it.