Almost nothing was made
The strangest thing about Fountain is how little there is to describe under “the making.” There is no canvas, no carving, no casting, no studio labor of the usual kind. Duchamp acquired a factory-made porcelain urinal, the sort sitting in any plumber’s show window, turned it onto its back, and brushed the words “R. Mutt 1917” onto the rim in black paint. That is the sum of the physical work: a fixture bought, a fixture rotated, a fake name signed. He called objects like this readymades, a word he had been using since around 1915 for ordinary manufactured things he selected and declared to be art without altering them in any meaningful way. Fountain is the most famous of them.
And then the object did the thing that makes its whole history peculiar: it disappeared. After the 1917 show, the urinal was lost. There is no surviving original. Duchamp’s biographer Calvin Tomkins offered the most likely explanation, which is also the most ordinary: it was probably thrown out as rubbish, the common fate of Duchamp’s early readymades, which nobody at the time treated as precious. The single most influential object in modern art was almost certainly carted off with the trash.
Stieglitz makes the only record
Before it vanished, though, one thing saved it. Duchamp had the photographer Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946), the most important photographer in America and a champion of modern art, photograph the urinal at his gallery, known as 291. Stieglitz set it on a pedestal, lit it carefully so the white porcelain glowed, and made a single image. That photograph, reproduced in the spring of 1917, is the only surviving picture of the original object. Everything we know about how the lost Fountain actually looked, we know from this one photograph.
The situation is genuinely odd. The thing that became the most discussed art object of the century is a photograph of a lost urinal, and everything that hangs in museums today carries the same fingerprint of absence.