Fountain
Marcel Duchamp (1887 to 1968) · 1917, replica of 1964
Not currently on display. The Centre Pompidou building is closed for renovation from September 2025 until about 2030, so this work is not on view in Paris; check the museum website for where the collection is being shown.
A white porcelain urinal, turned on its back and signed R. Mutt 1917 in black paint. That is all. In April 1917 Marcel Duchamp bought a standard urinal from a plumbing showroom in New York, signed it with a false name and submitted it to an exhibition that had promised to show any work by any artist who paid the fee. The committee hid it behind a partition, Duchamp resigned in protest, and the original object vanished, surviving only in a photograph by Alfred Stieglitz. From that photograph, half a century later, this replica was made.
Duchamp called such objects readymades: mass produced things chosen by the artist and declared to be art, with no craft involved. Look at the urinal as he asked people to look at it, lying on its back so that its function disappears and its curves become those of a sculpture, a Buddha or a veiled woman, as one defender wrote at the time. The signature makes the joke precise: Mutt was the name of a plumbing firm and of a comic strip character, and the R may stand for Richard, French slang for a moneybags. The question the piece asks, whether art is in the making or in the choosing, has never gone away.
This version was produced in 1964 by the Galerie Schwarz in Milan, in an edition of eight authorised and signed by Duchamp, and the Centre Pompidou bought it in 1986. The 1917 original does not exist, so every Fountain in every museum is a replica, which is exactly the kind of paradox Duchamp enjoyed. In 2004 five hundred art professionals voted it the most influential artwork of the twentieth century.
Did You Know? Duchamp signed the underside of the 1964 replicas by hand, so the fake signature R. Mutt on the front is authenticated by a real one on the back.
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