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Duchamp Submitted a Urinal to the 1917 Independents and the Jury Hid It
In April 1917, the Society of Independent Artists held its first exhibition at the Grand Central Palace in New York. The Society had been founded the previous December on the principle that there would be no jury and no prizes. Anyone who paid the membership fee of six dollars could submit two works, and the Society pledged to exhibit every submission. On 9 April, a wooden crate arrived at the exhibition hall. Inside was a porcelain urinal of the kind manufactured by the J. L. Mott Iron Works on Fifth Avenue. It had been turned on its back, signed in black paint with the name "R. Mutt" and the date 1917, and labelled as the entry "Fountain" by R. Mutt of Philadelphia. The six-dollar submission fee had been paid. The Society's board met in private. The board removed the urinal from the floor, never displayed it, and never returned it. The exhibition ran for several weeks. Many of the artists who had submitted lesser-known work to the Society were now exhibited; the Fountain was not. R. Mutt did not collect his urinal. Who Was R. Mutt R. Mutt was Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp was a French painter who had moved to New York in 1915 to escape the war. He had already become known for the painting Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2, which had caused a scandal at the 1913 New York Armory Show. By 1917, he was one of the founding members of the Society of Independent Artists and on its board of directors. The Fountain submission was a test. Duchamp wanted to know whether the Society would actually honour its pledge to exhibit every submission, or whether the no-jury principle was a pose. He used the pseudonym R. Mutt (a play on the Mott Iron Works manufacturer's name and on the contemporary Mutt and Jeff cartoon strip) so that the board would not know it was him. He paid the six dollars from his own pocket. He waited to see what would happen. The board (which did not know R. Mutt was Duchamp) voted to suppress the entry by a narrow margin. The arguments were that the urinal was vulgar, that it was plagiarism (since Duchamp had not made it), and that it was simply not art. The vote was not unanimous; several board members (notably Walter Arensberg, a key Duchamp patron) voted to keep it. Duchamp resigned from the board immediately. He had not announced himself as the artist. He resigned on the grounds that the Society had failed its founding principle. Within days, the news that Fountain had been suppressed was circulating in New York art circles. The Photograph The original urinal disappeared shortly after the suppression. It was almost certainly thrown away. What survives is a photograph taken by Alfred Stieglitz at his 291 Gallery, sometime after the suppression. Duchamp had taken the urinal to Stieglitz, set it up against a painted backdrop (a painting by Marsden Hartley was used as the background), and asked Stieglitz to photograph it. The photograph was published in a small art journal called The Blind Man in May 1917. The Blind Man article that accompanied the photograph included an editorial defending Fountain. The argument was simple: "Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view — created a new thought for that object." The editorial was probably written by Duchamp himself, with the help of Beatrice Wood and Henri-Pierre Roché. It is the first explicit theoretical defence of the readymade as a category in art. The argument compresses what Duchamp had been working on for several years: that the act of selection, in art, was equivalent to the act of making. Five-Way Portrait of Marcel Duchamp, 21 June 1917, New York City. Duchamp photographed himself five times in the same composition, using a mirrored arrangement that allowed him to appear in profile, three-quarter, and full-face simultaneously. The Readymades Duchamp had begun making what he called "readymades" in 1913. The first was a bicycle wheel mounted on a stool. He had also made (and destroyed) a number of others before Fountain: a bottle rack, a snow shovel inscribed In Advance of the Broken Arm. The principle was always the same. He selected an ordinary manufactured object. He named it and signed it. He declared it to be art. The argument behind the readymades had several layers. The most obvious was that the artist's act was the act of selection, not the act of making. The deeper layer was about the question of what constitutes an art object at all. If a urinal could be art when selected and signed, then the conditions that made other things art (the painter's labour, the marble carving, the aesthetic judgment) could be analysed and questioned. The Fountain suppression made these arguments visible in public for the first time. Before 1917, the readymades had been private studio works. After 1917, they were the centrepiece of an ongoing argument about the nature of art that has not yet been settled. What Happened to the Urinal The original Fountain disappeared, almost certainly thrown out by the Society staff after the exhibition closed. Duchamp commissioned several replicas over the next fifty years. The first replica, made in 1950 for an exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York, is now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. A 1964 edition of eight replicas, made under Duchamp's supervision by the Galerie Schwarz in Milan, is now distributed across major museums: the Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou, the Indiana University Art Museum, and several private collections. The 1964 replicas are based on the Stieglitz photograph rather than the original urinal, since the original had been lost. The replicas are slightly larger than the original would have been and use a different model of porcelain urinal. They are nonetheless "the Fountain" in the institutional sense: Duchamp authorised them, the museums treat them as the work, the historical record refers to them as Fountain. What the Suppression Established The Society's suppression of Fountain was a public failure of the no-jury principle. The Society went on for several years (its annual exhibitions continued through the 1920s), but it never again claimed to be an open society. The pretence had been tested and broken. The argument that the suppression made possible was larger. Duchamp's Fountain, and the readymade principle behind it, became the founding move of conceptual art. The line that runs from Fountain through Dada, through Pop Art, through Conceptualism, through institutional critique, and into much of the contemporary art of the past sixty years, starts in April 1917. The 2004 survey of British art professionals, organised by Turner Prize patrons, voted Fountain the most influential artwork of the twentieth century. The vote was about a urinal that was never actually exhibited and was thrown out within weeks. Duchamp Afterwards Duchamp made no paintings after 1923 and (apparently) very little art of any kind after the late 1920s. He had publicly declared himself bored with painting. He spent the next forty years playing chess at competitive level, writing chess columns for newspapers, and making occasional small works in private. He maintained that he had retired from art. The retirement was a pose. From 1946 to 1966, Duchamp secretly worked on a single large installation, Étant donnés, a 3-D tableau viewed through a peephole in a wooden door, showing a nude female figure in a landscape. He worked on it in a studio in New York that nobody knew about. He left it to the Philadelphia Museum of Art at his death in 1968. The museum installed it according to his instructions, and it has been on display since. The Étant donnés revealed that the most influential conceptualist of the twentieth century had spent his official retirement years secretly making a single large object. The retirement had been a strategy. The argument Duchamp had begun in 1917 (about the conditions under which a thing becomes art) was being conducted, in his own studio, for another fifty years.
The Bayeux Tapestry Is 70 Metres Long and Was Probably Made by English Nuns
The Bayeux Tapestry is approximately seventy metres long and fifty centimetres tall. It is not a tapestry. A tapestry is woven; the Bayeux work is embroidered, with woollen yarn worked onto a linen cloth in eight different colours. It tells the story of the 1066 Norman Conquest of England in fifty-eight scenes, with a Latin inscription running above the figures throughout. It is the most extensive piece of pictorial narrative art surviving from the eleventh century. The cloth has hung in various locations for nearly nine hundred years. It was almost certainly made within ten years of the events it depicts. It survived the French Revolution (when it was nearly cut up to cover a baggage wagon), the Napoleonic Wars (when Napoleon ordered it brought to Paris for examination), and the German occupation of France (when the Nazis nearly shipped it to Germany before the Allied advance forced them to abandon the plan). It now hangs in a purpose-built museum in Bayeux, Normandy, where it has been since 1983. Who Made It The cloth was almost certainly made in England, not in Normandy. The evidence is technical and stylistic. The embroidery uses techniques (laid-and-couched work, stem stitch, split stitch) that were specialties of Anglo-Saxon embroidery workshops. The same techniques are documented in surviving fragments of English ecclesiastical embroidery from the same period. The Latin inscriptions use spellings characteristic of Anglo-Saxon Latin (such as "Eduardus" rather than the Norman "Edouardus") and include English place-names spelled in Anglo-Saxon orthography. Several scenes show details (the death of Edward the Confessor, the building of the ships) that match contemporary English accounts more closely than the Norman accounts. The workshop where the cloth was made was probably attached to one of the great Anglo-Saxon monastic houses. Canterbury, with St Augustine's Abbey and Christ Church Cathedral, is the most likely candidate. Both had active embroidery workshops in the late eleventh century. The Canterbury hypothesis is supported by the close stylistic relationship between the tapestry's figures and the figures in surviving Canterbury manuscripts of the same period. Who Commissioned It The patron was almost certainly Odo, Bishop of Bayeux. Odo was the half-brother of William the Conqueror and one of the central figures in the Norman conquest of England. He fought at Hastings, was made Earl of Kent by William, and held vast English estates from 1066 onward. He was also the political patron of his cathedral at Bayeux, where the tapestry was eventually housed. The case for Odo is circumstantial but strong. He had the resources to commission a work of this scale (an estimated 100,000 hours of embroidery labour). He had the political reason to celebrate the conquest. He had access to English workshops through his Kent earldom. And the tapestry's narrative gives Odo himself an unusually prominent role: he appears in three scenes, including one where he leads the Norman knights into battle at Hastings. What It Shows The narrative runs in fifty-eight scenes from left to right, with the Latin inscription above. The story begins with King Edward the Confessor in Westminster sending Harold Godwinson to Normandy in 1064. Harold sails across the Channel, is captured by Count Guy of Ponthieu, is ransomed by William of Normandy, fights alongside William in a Breton campaign, and (in a scene whose interpretation is still disputed) swears an oath on holy relics to support William's claim to the English throne. Harold then returns to England. King Edward dies in January 1066. Harold is crowned the next day. A comet appears (the work shows Halley's Comet, which actually appeared over England in April 1066). News reaches Normandy. William begins building ships. The Norman fleet sails. The army lands at Pevensey. The Battle of Hastings begins. The battle scenes (over half the surviving cloth) show the Norman cavalry charging the Anglo-Saxon shield-wall, the fighting at close range, and (at the end) the death of King Harold. The famous arrow-in-the-eye scene is here, though it has been recently re-interpreted: the arrow may not be hitting the eye, and the figure shown being hit by an arrow may not be Harold at all but a different soldier. The labelled "Harold" appears to be a slightly different figure, falling under the swords of mounted knights. Bayeux Tapestry, scenes 32-33: Halley's Comet appears over England in April 1066, watched by frightened Anglo-Saxons. The embroiderers have caught the comet in mid-flight, with the tail trailing across the linen cloth. What Is Missing The surviving cloth ends after the battle. The original almost certainly continued for several more scenes: the rout of the Anglo-Saxon survivors, the Norman march toward London, the coronation of William at Westminster on Christmas Day 1066. These scenes survive in summary form in the Latin chronicles of the conquest, but the embroidered version of them has been lost. The current end of the cloth is frayed and torn; some scholars estimate that as much as three metres of the original has been lost. The end may have been lost relatively early. The earliest surviving copy of the cloth (a 1729 antiquarian drawing) already shows the same ending we have today. The Lower Border Above and below the main narrative band, the cloth carries decorative borders of small animals, fantastical beasts, and (in places) small figural scenes. The upper border is mostly decorative. The lower border, particularly in the battle scenes, shows dead soldiers, looters stripping the dead, and severed limbs. The borders comment on the main action: while the inscribed narrative shows the dignified violence of the cavalry charge, the border shows the same violence at ground level, with corpses and looters. The borders also include several scenes that have been interpreted as moral commentary on the action. A fable of the fox and the crow appears in the border near the beginning, possibly suggesting that the diplomatic exchanges between Harold and William involved trickery on both sides. A scene of Aesop's wolf and lamb appears at a similarly sensitive moment. Why It Survived The tapestry was kept at Bayeux Cathedral from at least the twelfth century onward. It was displayed annually during the Feast of the Relics. It survived the cathedral fires of 1106 and 1142, possibly because it was stored in a separate building. It survived the French Wars of Religion in the sixteenth century, when the cathedral was sacked but the tapestry was hidden by clerics. The closest the cloth came to destruction was during the French Revolution in 1792. A group of French national guards came to the cathedral to seize cloth for covering ammunition wagons. The tapestry was about to be cut up when a local lawyer, Lambert Léonard-Leforestier, intervened, arguing that the cloth was of antiquarian importance and should be preserved. The guards relented. Napoleon had the tapestry brought to Paris in 1803, where it was exhibited at the Louvre as part of the propaganda campaign for his planned (and then abandoned) invasion of England. It was returned to Bayeux in 1804 and kept in the cathedral until 1842, when it was moved to a public museum. The Museum The current display building, opened in 1983, contains the tapestry in a long curved corridor with controlled lighting and humidity. The cloth is mounted behind glass under low light to slow further fading. The Latin inscription has been provided in translation panels. Audio guides are available in twelve languages. The museum draws approximately 400,000 visitors a year. The cloth's planned move to a temporary display in the British Museum, announced and then postponed several times, has been a recurring point of Anglo-French cultural discussion since the 2018 visit of President Macron to London. The cloth, made in England and exhibited in France for nine hundred years, would return to England for the first time. As of 2026, the move remains under discussion but is not scheduled. The seventy metres of embroidered linen continue to do what they were made to do nearly a millennium ago: tell the story of a single year that changed the political, linguistic, and cultural history of England, with a narrative clarity that no later medium has equalled.
Salomon Painted 769 Gouaches Before Being Sent to Auschwitz at Twenty-Six
Charlotte Salomon was born in Berlin in 1917 to a wealthy Jewish family. Her mother, Franziska, killed herself when Charlotte was nine, by jumping from a window. Charlotte was told that her mother had died of influenza. The truth about the suicide, and about the long history of suicides in the maternal line of Charlotte's family, was kept from her until she was twenty-three. She was then told everything in a single afternoon by her grandfather, who was about to commit suicide himself. Between 1940 and 1942, in the small French Mediterranean town of Villefranche-sur-Mer where she had fled with her grandparents, Salomon painted 769 gouaches on individual sheets of paper. The gouaches were numbered, arranged into a sequence, and given titles. The whole work, which Salomon called Leben? oder Theater? (Life? or Theatre?), tells the story of her life and family up to the moment of her grandfather's revelation. She finished it in the spring of 1942. She gave the work to a French doctor for safekeeping. She was deported to Auschwitz in October 1943 and killed on arrival. She was twenty-six and five months pregnant. Berlin Salomon's father, Albert, was a surgeon and a respected academic in Berlin. After the death of his first wife, he married a singer named Paula Lindberg. Paula effectively became Charlotte's mother and stepmother, and Charlotte's relationship with her was both close and competitive. Charlotte attended the Vereinigte Staatsschulen, the Berlin united state art schools, from 1936 to 1938. She was the only Jewish student admitted in 1936, and she was admitted only by an administrative oversight: her application had not been flagged as Jewish, and by the time the school realised, she had already enrolled. She studied painting and won the school's prize for best student in 1938. She was barred from accepting the prize in person because of her race. By 1938 the family situation in Berlin had become impossible. Charlotte's grandparents had fled to the south of France in 1933. After Kristallnacht (November 1938), Albert and Paula sent Charlotte to join her grandparents in the south of France. She left Berlin on 1 January 1939 and never saw her father or stepmother again. Both survived the war; both returned to Berlin afterwards. The Suicides The history that Charlotte's grandfather revealed to her in 1940 was as follows. Her mother Franziska had committed suicide in 1926. Her aunt Charlotte (Charlotte's namesake) had committed suicide in 1913. Her grandmother had attempted suicide several times. Several other women in the family across three generations had killed themselves. The pattern was being kept secret from Charlotte because the family worried she would conclude that the same fate awaited her. The grandfather told her the whole history because he had decided to kill himself. He had become depressed in the south of France, was certain the Nazis would eventually reach Villefranche, and could not bear waiting. He intended to die that evening. He wanted Charlotte to understand the family she came from. The grandfather did kill himself that night. Charlotte spent the next eighteen months in the south of France, with her grandmother (who soon died of cancer) and increasingly alone. The whole of Leben? oder Theater? was conceived and painted in this period. What She Painted The work is 769 individual gouache sheets, approximately 32 by 25 centimetres each, painted in tempera. They are numbered in pencil at the top right. They are designed to be read in sequence: as a kind of graphic novel before graphic novels existed, or a film told entirely in painted frames. The narrative tells the story of Salomon's family from the late nineteenth century onward, focused on the women: the suicides, the marriages, the relocations, the secrets. Salomon used fictional names for everyone, but the figures are recognisable. Her mother is called Franziska. Her stepmother is called Paulinka. The grandfather is called Daberlohn (a play on "Tagelöhner," day-labourer). Charlotte herself is called Charlotte Kann. The technique is unusual. Salomon used a limited palette: yellow, red, blue, black, white, with small variations. The figures are simplified, almost cartoonish, but the compositions are sophisticated. The earlier sheets show single scenes; the later sheets layer multiple scenes onto a single sheet, with text written across them and figures repeating across the surface. The whole work moves from a relatively conventional narrative style at the beginning to an increasingly fluid, almost cinematic visual language by the end. Salomon wrote text directly onto the gouaches: descriptions, dialogue, musical references (she indicated specific songs from operas, popular music, and German lieder that she wanted to accompany the reading of each section). The intended experience of the work is multi-sensory: image, text, and music all simultaneously. Charlotte Salomon, photograph, c. 1939–40. Joods Historisch Museum, Amsterdam. The End Salomon married Alexander Nagler, a refugee from Vienna, in June 1943. The couple were living in Nice. By this point southern France had been occupied by Nazi Germany, and the round-up of Jews was systematic. On 24 September 1943, Salomon and Nagler were arrested by the Gestapo at their home. They were transferred first to Drancy, the holding camp outside Paris, and then deported to Auschwitz on 7 October 1943. Charlotte Salomon was killed in the gas chamber on arrival at Auschwitz on 10 October 1943. She was twenty-six and five months pregnant. Alexander Nagler was killed in Auschwitz on 1 January 1944. What Survived Before the arrest, Salomon had given the complete Leben? oder Theater? to the French doctor Georges Moridis, who had been treating her family in Villefranche. She told him, "This is my whole life." He kept the work hidden through the rest of the war. After the liberation, Moridis returned the work to Salomon's father Albert, who had survived in Amsterdam. Albert and his wife eventually donated the entire 769-sheet work, plus Salomon's letters and surviving smaller drawings, to the Joods Historisch Museum (Jewish Historical Museum) in Amsterdam in 1971. The work has been held there since. What Took So Long Salomon's work was not widely known until the 1960s. The first major publication was a 1962 selection in a German art journal. The first full exhibition (with all 769 sheets shown together) was at the Joods Historisch Museum in 1981. The work has slowly entered the canon since. The reception has been complicated by two questions. The first is whether Salomon's grandfather assaulted her sexually before his death; a 1990 letter from Salomon, written in 1943, claims that he did. The letter was kept private by the family for decades and was published only in 2015. The second question is what to make of Salomon's work as a Holocaust testimony: she completed it before her deportation, before the full scale of the Final Solution was clear, and the work does not address the Holocaust directly. It is a record of a German Jewish family's pre-Holocaust history, made by a woman about to be killed by the Holocaust. The 2017 Royal Academy exhibition Charlotte Salomon: Life? or Theatre? (London) was the largest international showing of the work. The 2023 Centre Pompidou-Metz retrospective, which combined the gouaches with photographic and archival material, brought new audiences. Salomon is now considered one of the central figures in the early-twentieth-century narrative tradition that anticipates the modern graphic novel. What the Work Argues The title Leben? oder Theater? is a question. Is what Salomon shows life, or is it theatre? Both, the work suggests. The family history is true; the way she has rendered it (with theatrical staging, song cues, cinematic framing) is invented. The truth of the work is in the structure she has imposed on the chaos: the decision to look at her own family's pattern of suicide and ask what it meant for her own future. The 769 sheets are an attempt by a twenty-three-year-old painter to understand her own life by painting it. The painter died at twenty-six. The work continues. The Joods Historisch Museum in Amsterdam allows visitors to examine the sheets one by one, in the sequence Salomon numbered them. The whole work takes approximately three hours to read.