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This just looks like a bouquet of flowers to me, could be starting to rot as there is an insect near by. It could represent how thing s in general, or good and beautiful thing always eventually come to an end.

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I see lots of canned soups. Could talk about past wars were they had to stock up on canned food to survive through out the war, and it was the cheepest.

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Looks like a weird urinal for a child

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they look like normal flowers, however from the bottom right side, you can see that it is dying and decaying. This could show that beauty or good can come to an end

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Many small pictures of Ŝ̶̛͚̯̀O̵̖̦̓Ư̵̻̤͌P̵̺͠.
Ŝ̶̛͚̯̀O̵̖̦̓Ư̵̻̤͌P̵̺͠ /cans were used in mass amounts in wars due to lack of production of fresh foods, and the long shelf date of can food.

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A urinal for child / potty, could talk about potty training

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Lots of flowers. A very big variety of colour, shapes, theyre just pretty flowers with a wide variety. Most flower bunches come in a set theme or colour/shape/come in 2 species, while this is just a bunch of pretty.

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There are lots of cans, which could represent how people were stoking up on food during war.

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It looks like a urinal. For kids. Potty.

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Some flowers look dead, and there are lots of variety of colours and type of flowers, and they almost seem to be in unison.

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A bunch of soup cans and it can could be about how life can sometimes be repetitive.

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It looks like a urinal.

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This artwork seems to be a fancy vase of flowers. However, the lighting of the art seems to be dark trying to emphasize a message.

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Looks like a urinal for kids.

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A urinal where the urine comes back like a boomerang. May represent how your wrongdoings come back to you. Bad karma.

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This is a still art is representing a urinal for men that only has one way from out which is the same side where the person would use it.

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an inanimate being with possibly sentimental or material value

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an object is a tangible thing, something thats not living

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Something without a will of it's own

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An object is something that is mostly non living, and can be felt and viewed.

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an artwork (drawing/painting) of an inanimate object with possibly sentimental or material value

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an object is a physical item that can be seen and touched.

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art that is made up of objects and appears still, but has lots of meaning and stories behind it. either personal to the viewer or to the artists. it can also be used to raise awareness towards specific topics

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probably 50+

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An artwork / drawing with inanimate objects

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Its a pair of white high heels on a silver platter, which are tied together with rope which makes the shoes look like a turkey, this could tie to the expectation of women working in the kitchen/ at home

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Infinite

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Something that has no life to it. An we can posses it.

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3000

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A inanimate bieng that can have a meaning and purpose and what we encounter in our everyday lives

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something that isn't living but that we can see

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its a type of artwork, which generally demonstrates stationery objects connected to sentiments.

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pair of heels in the shape of a turkey that could symbolize the sterotype of how women are always expected to cook.

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heels upside down, this could represent a feminist theme?

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still life is an artwork including objects that are still / arent moving.

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An art work that is composed of objects and items that we can see and touch

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a lot

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A pair of high heels made to look like some sort of cooked turkey on a plate

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comebined about a 253

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many!

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An art piece made up of objects that can either create a meaning or story about it. It represents the artists intentions.

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It looks kinda like a weird toilet, mabe it oculd represent a lack of privacy (due to the camera-looking thing on it)

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More than 100

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Like 25000

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various cans stacked, maybe this could represent a food shortage or the political/social climate at the time

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A weird looking urinal

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Artwork that is still and portrays and object that maybe does not move.

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anything that can be seen or touched and has a somewhat tangible form. a thing, person, or thing to which one directs one's thoughts or actions

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its a urinal from the walls high perspective (upside down)

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100+ each

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it looks like a weird urinal/ toilet

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this looks like a bouquet of flowers, could represent something for a marriage

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looks like a shelf filled with rotting fruit, could represent age or death

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It is a pair of white high heels, upside down and served on a silver platter, it might represent a turkey. This might suggest the high demand of quality objects.

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a pair of old styled fancy heels strapped to a serving tray. the shoes typically represent women which could mean that they are expected to do the cooking and working in the kitchen.

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They look like a pair of face down high heels.
Maybe they mean like changing phases of your life to where you do not need heels. So like settling down

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It looks like an ugly urinal and toilet maybe like on a plane

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it shows consumerism during the war. where people were unable to buy fresh foods, leading to ration on canned foods, which were cheap and long lasting. the wall has endless cans which can represent how much of a nationwide problem this was.

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the top view of a urinal. not sure what it could mean.

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rows of stacked cans, this could represent food shortage or it could be an advertisement

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This looks like a urinal with a hole where the person urinates. This might suggest pollution how we are ruining our world as the waste we produce and throw away and how that affects us.

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it is a pair of heels on a platter, the white heels might signify peace and the rope tied around it might be thoughts or people trying to restrict it. The plate might signify the world.

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I think this could represent food over consumption

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There are a lot of different cans of soups maybe they represent poor people or are repetitive. Maybe they represent people

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I see alot of canned soups. It could represent the constant repetitive activities we are going through as there are zero to none changes in design.

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Canned soup of the month

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theres a big bouqet of beautiful colorful flowers as the main subejct. however, the bug in the back is looking quite "sad" and the strucutre of it looks tired since its hunching. this coud represent how normally good things from others hard work (bugs pollinate flowers) and are usually not given credit for it.

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It has a name and date on it,
it looks like a urinal

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many different types of canned soup lined up on the wall could represent the meals of hungry people during the war. the same everyday.

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The flowers look younger on the front and darker and older in the back. Maybe how some people have different ways of showing themselves

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weird painting of some sort of garden

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It is a pair of high heels represented in the shape of a turkey, could symbolize a transition in a woman's life.

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it looks like someones view of windows and food inside the room. it could repsent how some ppl have less and look at things like food like it is very impressive

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we see a lot of soup cans stacked together, maybe to show unity during harsh times, like world hunger

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What is an object?“A material thing that can be seen and touched”“A thing external to the thinking mind or subject.”Oxford Dictionaries

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What is an object?“A material thing that can be seen and touched”“A thing external to the thinking mind or subject.”Oxford Dictionaries

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I see a bouquet of flowers, the front is fulled with beautiful flowers that have bloomed, while the back is filled with dead, withered ones. The blooming flowers might represent the wealthy, and the withered flowers at back being the poor. This feeds into the idea of " the rich gets richer, while the poor gets poorer". as the blooming flowers are getting more and more beautiful while the withered flowers are decaying.

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STILL LIFE

One of the principal genres (subject types) of Western art – essentially, the subject matter of a still life painting or sculpture is anything that does not move or is dead

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"Woman is a sandwich covered in white marble. Who covers a soup spoon in precious fur? Little Meret. Who has outdone us all? Little Meret."

Summary of Meret Oppenheim

Meret Oppenheim's notebook from high school math class contains the following equation: "X= an Orange Rabbit". André Breton (the pope of Surrealism) loved this so much he published the whole notebook. With the looks of a Hollywood film star, and the brain of a mad scientist, Oppenheim managed to persuade the Surrealists to allow her to join their circle (which until then was strictly no-girls-allowed). Her fetishistic sculptures, fashioned from teacups, fur, high heels and other feminine domestic objects, address the themes of food, sex, death, cannibalism and bondage, always with a mischievous twist. Her famous fur-lined teacup was instantly embraced by the Surrealists as the quintessential expression of their movement.

Accomplishments

Of all the Surrealists, she took Breton's call "to hound the mad beast of function" most literally. Her sculptures repurpose household objects intended to serve one function and suggest another, usually outrageous, function for which they might be used.

Oppenheim was the only Surrealist who had any authority on psychoanalysis. Born into a family of Swiss analysts, Oppenheim was steeped in psychoanalytic theory and followed the teachings of Carl Gustav Jung. Throughout her life, she kept a dream diary that served as a wellspring for her creativity.

Oppenheim's work with the fashion industry helped break down the barriers between fine art and fashion. The line of Surrealist gloves she designed for the high-end clothier Elsa Schiaparelli (who went on to collaborate with Salvador Dalí) were especially cutting-edge, and continue to be widely imitated.

Although Oppenheim is normally aligned with Surrealism, her daring use of found objects is straight-up Dada. She is a key transitional figure, linking the two movements.

At a time when the only acceptable role for a woman in the art world was mistress or muse, Oppenheim made it as an artist. She broke the glass ceiling of Surrealism and beat it at its own game, harnessing the power of fantasies about dominance and submission (prevalent themes in Surrealist art) in an effort to destroy them.

Biography of Meret Oppenheim

Oppenheim grew up in Switzerland in a progressive, intellectual family. Her grandmother was active in the Swiss women's rights movement, and her aunt encouraged her to collect prints by Paul Klee, an important early influence on the young artist. Oppenheim's father was a psychoanalyst. At his recommendation, she recorded her dreams (which, according to psychoanalytic theory, provide insight into the unconscious) as a teenager and continued this practice for the rest of her life. The Surrealist 'pope' André Breton, an early champion of her work, later published some of these early writings in Le Cahier d'une Écolière (1957). Her dream images inspired her earliest paintings in 1931, among them Wurgeengel (an angel strangling an infant) and Suicides' Institute (a boy receives instruction on how to hang himself). By her late teens, Oppenheim was beginning to find life in Switzerland a little confining, and consulted her grandmother about whether or not to attend art school in Paris. Her grandmother conducted a Tarot card reading that predicted Oppenheim's life would be full of struggle, but ultimately deeply fulfilling from a creative standpoint. Oppenheim later remembered that that was the permission she needed to make the "conscious decision to be free" and move to Paris.

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"Woman is a sandwich covered in white marble. Who covers a soup spoon in precious fur? Little Meret. Who has outdone us all? Little Meret." Meret Oppenheim's notebook from high school math class contains the following equation: "X= an Orange Rabbit". André Breton (the pope of Surrealism) loved this so much he published the whole notebook.

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The still life has witnessed a transformative and interesting evolution from the bottom of the hierarchy of artistic genres - its subjects not considered important enough by humanists to be worth painting - to the magnificent Dutch Golden Age still lifes, which arose under a protestant spirit that deemed every part of God's creation worth depicting. In France, it underwent a revival in the late nineteenth century, when modernist painters discovered it as the perfect subject for the formal exploration of different styles, colours and compositions. Still lifes were ideal for bourgeois households and quickly rose in popularity. Modernist pioneer Edouard Manet explored different subjects ranging from ham to lilacs and expressed that 'a painter can say all he wants to with fruits or flowers, or even clouds.'

HERMENEGILDO ANGLADA-CAMARASA, DAHLIAS AND OTHER FLOWERS, 1951. ESTIMATE £70,000-90,000.

If the Catalan painter Hermenegildo Anglada-Camarasa was trying to say anything through his flowers, it must have been sheer joy. This luminous bouquet of fresh dahlias and wild roses, a highlight of the upcoming 19th Century European Paintings auction, shines so livelily, that the French word for still life - nature morte or dead nature - hardly applies. These flowers express life as vivid as it gets, a moment of beauty is captured for eternity. Putting it into context with Old Master works of the genre, Rachel Ruysch's magnificent flower still life celebrates nature's beauty enthroned on a marble ledge as if it were presented on an altar. Unlike Anglada's work, it is probably not a realistic representation of an actual bouquet but brings together blossoms from different seasons, often even from various parts of the world, which complement one another; tiny insects feeding on the leaves are reminders of the brevity of life and the contingence of beauty. Anglada's flowers are painted from a slightly elevated viewpoint, close-up rather than removed, and arranged as if freshly plucked from his humble garden.

RACHEL RUYSCH, A STILL LIFE OF ROSES, POPPIES, CARNATIONS, A TULIP, HONEYSUCKLE AND OTHER FLOWERS IN A GLASS VASE RESTING ON A MARBLE LEDGE, 1716.

Unlike Anglada, Ruysch neither gives us a notion of what kind of bouquets people had in their homes, nor does she capture a particular moment of life. Though each flower will have been studied individually from nature, the composition is the artist's invention, created for a decorative purpose as well as for contemplation. Not coincidentally is this bouquet crowned by a tulip, the popular and at the time vastly expensive flower that has become a sort of national icon of the Netherlands. But Anglada's work does more than just capture a bouquet - it mediates the artist's impression of it. The viewer is actually able to feel what the painter felt when he painted these flowers, which seem to be growing out of the picture, towards the light, using vivid paints applied in thick impastos, set into relief by the dark green background. Anglada was fascinated by fireworks and pyrotechnics borne out in the explosion of colour in his still lifes and landscapes. Here, the flowers shoot up like fireworks in a night sky.

So what of still life today? As everyone lives life fast, art can make us pause and really look at our environment and our rushed activities. The German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans captures life and our surroundings in great detail. He regards the photograph as 'a body entangled in the world. It does not just exist passively - it is a sociable and open body that actively meets the real world around it.'

WOLFGANG TILLMANS, STILL HOME, 1996. © WOLFGANG TILLMANS, COURTESY MAUREEN PALEY, LONDON

His still lifes are thus in no way dead nature but on the contrary, very much alive. Still Home shows half-eaten fruit and nuts on a plate. The sun shines warmly onto this arrangement to which the viewer is drawn by the pleasing colours and which looks so appetizing despite essentially being food waste. Dispersed pomegranate seeds are mixed with pistachio shells and the skin of a grapefruit, covering the bread knife used to cut open the fruit. Through his hanging, Tillmans always emphasizes the medium of the photograph, exposing them mainly without frames. They are no longer windows to another world but objects - or bodies if you will - in the room to which the viewer is drawn and which provoke a reaction. Standing in Wolfgang Tillman's exhibition at Tate Modern, we do not marvel at arranged compositions but are confronted with various angles of life standing still, focusing our attention on a variety of objects, activities and issues at the same time. One is essentially surrounded by life - still life.

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The still life has witnessed a transformative and interesting evolution from the bottom of the hierarchy of artistic genres - its subjects not considered important enough by humanists to be worth painting - to the magnificent Dutch Golden Age still lifes, which arose under a protestant spirit that...

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is one of Duchamp's most famous works and is widely seen as an icon of twentieth-century art. The original, which is lost, consisted of a standard urinal, usually presented on its back for exhibition purposes rather than upright, and was signed and dated 'R. Mutt 1917'. Tate's work is a 1964 replica and is made from glazed earthenware painted to resemble the original porcelain. The signature is reproduced in black paint. Fountain has been seen as a quintessential example, along with Duchamp's Bottle Rack 1914, of what he called a ' readymade ', an ordinary manufactured object designated by the artist as a work of art (and, in Duchamp's case, interpreted in some way).

Duchamp later recalled that the idea for Fountain arose from a discussion with the collector Walter Arensberg (1878-1954) and the artist Joseph Stella (1877-1946) in New York. He purchased a urinal from a sanitary ware supplier and submitted it - or arranged for it to be submitted - as an artwork by 'R. Mutt' to the newly established Society of Independent Artists that Duchamp himself had helped found and promote on the lines of the Parisian Salon des Indépendants (Duchamp had moved from Paris to New York in 1915). The society's board of directors, who were bound by the Society's constitution to accept all members' submissions, took exception to Fountain, believing that a piece of sanitary ware - and one associated with bodily waste - could not be considered a work of art and furthermore was indecent (presumably, although this was not said, if displayed to women). Following a discussion and a vote, the directors present during the installation of the show at the Grand Central Palace (about ten of them according to a report in the New York Herald) narrowly decided on behalf of the board to exclude the submission from the Society's inaugural exhibition that opened to the public on 10 April 1917. Arensberg and Duchamp resigned in protest against the board taking it upon itself to veto and effectively censor an artist's work.

This was no small matter. The idea of having a jury-free exhibition of contemporary art had become invested with the aspirations of many in the art world for New York to become a dynamic artistic centre that would rival and even outstrip Paris. Duchamp, as head of the hanging committee, had already signaled the democratic ethos of the new Society by proposing that works should be hung by the artists' last names (in alphabetical order) rather than according to the subjective views and preferences of one or more individuals. With the support of some backers, he and his close friends Henri-Pierre Roché (1879-1959) and Beatrice Wood (1892-1998) produced the first dada periodical in New York, titled pointedly the Blindman, on the first day of the show in part to celebrate (and in part to observe and comment upon) 'the birth of the Independence of Art in America' (Henri-Pierre Roché, 'The Blind Man', Blindman, no.1, 10 April 1917, p.3). There was therefore a good deal at stake in the decision of the board to defend a particular conception of art at the expense of departing from its own much advertised policy of 'no jury - no prizes'. Responding to press interest in the affair, the board issued a statement defending its position: 'The Fountain may be a very useful object in its place, but its place is not in an art exhibition and it is, by no definition, a work of art.' (Naumann 2012, p.72.)

Duchamp never explicitly commented on why he wanted to test the principles of his fellow board members but it may well have sprung from his own experience at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris. In 1912 he had submitted his important painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No.2 to the Salon, and, even though the work was listed in the catalogue, the organisers, increasingly unhappy at the subject and title of the painting and how this reflected upon them, asked Duchamp's brothers, who were also artists, to ask him to withdraw it a few days before the show opened. He quietly did so, but he experienced this as an extraordinary betrayal and later described it as a turning-point in his life. The creation and submission of Fountain can thus be seen as in part as an experiment by Duchamp to replay this event, testing the commitment of the new American Society to freedom of expression and its tolerance of new conceptions of art.

Within a day or so of the exhibition opening, Duchamp located the work, which had been stored in the exhibition space behind a partition, and took it to be photographed by the leading photographer and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz (1877-1946). (A diary entry of Beatrice Wood for 13 April 1917 recorded that she went with Duchamp to 'see Stieglitz about "Fountain"', while a letter written by Stieglitz dated 19 April 1917 noted that he had been asked to take the photograph 'at the request of Roché, Covert, Miss Wood, Duchamp & Co'. See Naumann 2012, p.72.) As the work of art was lost thereafter (and had been seen by very few people), Stieglitz's photograph, which according to a letter had been taken by 19 April 1917, became a key document in recording the work's existence. Stieglitz was proud of the image, writing in a letter dated 23 April 1917, 'The "Urinal" photograph is really quite a wonder - Everyone who has seen it thinks it beautiful - And it's true - it is. It has an oriental look about it - a cross between a Buddha and a Veiled Woman' (Naumann 2012, p.74).

A slightly cropped version of the photograph was published in the Blind Man to illustrate an anonymous editorial that defended the urinal in clear - and, in their implications, revolutionary - terms: 'Mr Mutt's fountain is not immoral, that is absurd, no more than a bathtub is immoral. It is a fixture that you see every day in plumbers' shop windows. Whether Mr Mutt with his own hands made the fountain 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.' (Anon., 'The Richard Mutt Case', Blind Man, New York, no.2, May 1917, p.5; note that the second issue formulated the journal's title as separate words.) Duchamp later said that he shared and approved of the views expressed in the article, which Beatrice Wood claimed in her 1992 autobiography to have written.

Importantly, Duchamp was not publicly known as the creator of Fountain at the time, although some of his closest friends (such as Walter Arensberg) must have known of, and many others suspected, his involvement. Stieglitz, for example, wrote on 19 April 1917, 'a young Woman (probably at Duchamp's instigation) sent a large porcelain Urinal on a pedestal to the Independent[s]' (Naumann 2012, p.74.) Duchamp later explained that he had not made his identity known because of his position on the Society's board: if his fellow board members had known he had submitted Fountain, their response might well have been different, and he would have been shown to have put friends and colleagues in a potentially difficult position (which, indeed, was the case). The fact that 'R. Mutt' was an unknown artist meant that Duchamp could test the openness of the society to artworks that did not conform to conventional aesthetic and moral standards without compromising the outcome or his relationships with board members, though at the expense of being able to avow that the work was his own.

'R. Mutt', however, was an unusual name, with comic overtones, and this might have given people a clue as to its falseness. Later in life, when asked whether 'R. Mutt' was a pun on the German word Armut meaning poverty, Duchamp was quoted as explaining:

Mutt comes from Mott Works, the name of a large sanitary equipment manufacturer. But Mott was too close so I altered it to Mutt, after the daily cartoon strip "Mutt and Jeff" which appeared at the time, and with which everyone was familiar. Thus, from the start, there was an interplay of Mutt: a fat little funny man, and Jeff: a tall thin man ... I wanted any old name. And I added Richard [French slang for money-bags]. That's not a bad name for a pissotière. Get it? The opposite of poverty. But not even that much, just R. MUTT.
(Camfield 1989, p.23.)

In fact, Mutt was the tall thin man in the cartoon duo but Duchamp's point about having wanted essentially 'any old name' remains. On other occasions Duchamp recalled that he bought the urinal at J.L. Mott Iron Works Company. Surviving records for the sanitary ware firm are incomplete but show models similar, if not entirely identical, to Fountain (see Camfield 1989, p.24, note 23).

Duchamp never commented - or was asked to comment - upon the rotation of the urinal by ninety degrees, but this was perhaps dealt with in the anonymous Blind Man article as a matter of 'placing' it 'so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view'. Duchamp was fascinated by the problems of representing spatially a fourth dimension, often demonstrated in mathematical texts through diagrams showing the rotation of solids. It is possible that the rotation of the urinal was linked to his broader interest in seeing things quite literally in a new perspective. The intimate nature of the function of the urinal, and its highly gendered character, also resonated strongly with the complex psycho-physical themes of the masterpiece he was working on at the time, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even 1915-23 (also known as The Large Glass; see Tate ), although relatively few at the time knew of the unfinished work and, therefore, were able to make this association.

Several photographs believed to have been taken in 1918 show Fountain hanging in the doorway of Duchamp's studio (there is no reason to believe that Duchamp owned a second or different urinal), but what happened to the artwork thereafter is a mystery. It was possibly thrown out when Duchamp went to Buenos Aires in 1918, the year that the poet Guillaume Apollinaire wrote an article on the Richard Mutt affair for the Mercure de France. Focusing on the issues involved in the case (and not mentioning Duchamp by name), Apollinaire concluded, 'The viewpoint of the Society of Independent Artists is evidently absurd for it arises from the untenable point of view that art cannot enoble an object' (Naumann 2012, p.75).

In the early 1920s Duchamp travelled frequently between America and France. He was thought to have abandoned making art, focusing instead on playing chess competitively even while remaining part of artistic circles. Fountain was not publicly commented upon again until 1934 when the leader of the surrealist movement and poet André Breton wrote a pioneering article that reviewed Duchamp's career to date and placed the Fountain firmly in the context of Duchamp's readymades (André Breton, 'La Phare de la mariée', Minotaure, vol.2, no.6, 1935, pp.45-9). Since so little was published on Duchamp, the article seems to have been based on in-depth conversations with the artist. It was in this period that Duchamp felt the need to consolidate and make more accessible his otherwise dispersed (and already partly lost) oeuvre. He published a facsimile edition of his notes relating to the Large Glass, and produced a portable museum of his key works in an editioned box, titled Box in a Valise (From or by Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Sélavy) 1935-41 (Rrose Sélavy was the name of Duchamp's female alter ego). In this he included a miniature Fountain arranged next to an equally miniature Large Glass, the lower half of which is known as the 'bachelors' domain'.

Duchamp's profile in art circles rose dramatically in the 1950s and 1960s, not least as a new generation of artists identified his dada-period works as precedents for their own. In 1963 the Pasadena Art Museum organised the first retrospective of Duchamp's work. Addressing the growing number of requests from gallerists and museums for works to show, Duchamp authorised a number of replicas of his original readymades, many of which had been lost. He authorised replicas of Fountain in 1950 and 1963. In 1964 the Galleria Schwarz reproduced Fountain, along with other dada-period works by Duchamp, in an edition of eight, fabricating the objects on the basis on the Stieglitz photograph and working closely with Duchamp. Four further examples were also made at this time, one each for Duchamp and Arturo Schwarz, and two for museum exhibition. Duchamp signed each of these replicas on the back of the left flange 'Marcel Duchamp 1964'. There is also a copperplate on the base of each work etched with Duchamp's signature, the dates of the original and the replica, the title, the edition number and the publisher's name, 'Galleria Schwarz, Milan'. For some, such replicas seemed to undermine cardinal qualities of readymades, namely, that they should be mass-produced items and ones chosen by an artist at a particular moment and time. Duchamp, however, was happy to remove the aura of uniqueness surrounding the original readymades, while the production of replicas ensured that more people would see the works and increased the likelihood that the ideas they represented would survive.

Tate's replica was included in the inaugural displays of Tate Modern in 2000, and in 2004 Fountain topped a poll of 500 British art experts as the single most influential artwork of the twentieth century, ahead of Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon 1907 and Andy Warhol's Marilyn Diptych 1962. Simple in form but rich in metaphor, the work has generated many interpretations over the years, and continues to be seen as a work that challenges - or, at the least, complicates - conventional definitions of art. In his introduction to his 1989 book-length study of the work William Camfield acknowledged the 'staggering' quantity of material written about the piece but noted that, despite the wealth of scholarship,

an examination of this literature reveals that our knowledge of this readymade sculpture and its history is riddled with gaps and extraordinary conflicts of memory, interpretation, and criticism. We are not even able to consult the object itself, since it disappeared early on, and we have no idea what happened to it ... We do not even known with absolute certainty that Duchamp was the artist - he once attributed it to a female friend - and some of his comments raise fundamental questions regarding his intentions in this readymade.
(Camfield 1989, p.13.)

Camfield's reference to a female friend here was based on a letter Duchamp wrote to his sister Suzanne, who lived in Paris, on 11 April 1917. It included the following comment: 'One of my female friends under a masculine pseudonym, Richard Mutt, sent in a porcelain urinal as a sculpture; it was not at all indecent - no reason for refusing it. The committee has decided to refuse to show this thing. I have handed in my resignation and it will be a bit of gossip of some value in New York.' (Camfield 1989, p.28.) Camfield commented on this reference to a woman:

Even if we grant that he did not want his test of the Independents compromised by knowledge that Fountain had been submitted by a director of the organization, why did he mislead his sister in Paris? Was the account given to Suzanne merely a 'white lie' to conceal his authorship, or might we have here an early appearance of Duchamp's female alter ego Rrose Sélavy, or might he have been telling the truth? Was Fountain actually submitted by a female friend? And if, indeed, a female friend sent Fountain to the Independents, must that mean that she and not Duchamp was the artist who conceived, selected, and altered the urinal - or might she have acted merely as the shipping agent whose participation kept Duchamp out of sight? The last possibility seems most plausible, but this point remains a mystery.

As Camfield noted, there are several potential explanations for Duchamp's comment to his sister. Unfortunately, the records of the Society of Independent Artists are of no help here, as most were lost in a fire. It is important to note, however, that Duchamp wrote 'sent' not 'made', and his words do not indicate that he was implying that someone else was the work's creator.

In 2002 literary historian Irene Gammel claimed that, if a woman was involved in the submission of Fountain, that woman might have Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874-1927), an eccentric German poet and artist who loved Duchamp and was in turn jealous of him and mildly contemptuous of what she saw as his absorption in fashionable circles (see Irene Gammel, Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity. A Cultural Biography, Cambridge, Massachusetts 2002). Gammel explored the possibility that the Baroness was the creator of Fountain, claiming close affinities between the use of new sanitary ware in Fountain and of an old piece of plumbing (a plumbing trap), mounted on a carpenter's mitre box in a sculpture titled God that has been attributed to the Baroness. This unsigned work, now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, was originally thought to be by the painter Morton Schamberg on the basis of his photograph of it, but was reattributed by the scholar Francis M. Naumann to von Freytag-Loringhoven 'with' Schamberg, on the grounds that the assemblage of extraneous elements and unusual title probably fitted her artistic practice better than his, although he may have helped her with aspects of it (for a discussion of the documentary evidence supporting this reattribution see Francis M. Naumann, New York Dada 1915-23, New York 1994, p.128 note 9, p.234 and p.171.) The work's aesthetic, however, is far removed from the mass-produced aspect of Fountain, and there is nothing in von Freytag-Loringhoven's other works to suggest a lineage for the thinking expressed in Fountain.Gammel noted that von Freytag-Loringhoven was in Philadelphia in spring 1917, linking this to some unsourced press reports at the time of the scandal of the work having originated in Philadelphia, and concluded, 'there emerges the question of whether the rabble-rousing Baroness may have had a hand in the mysterious Fountain ... While final evidence of the Baroness's involvement may be missing, there is a great deal of circumstantial evidence that points to her artistic fingerprint' (Gammel 2002, p.225).

As Gammel acknowledged, however, there is no contemporary documentary evidence or testimony that points to the involvement of von Freytag-Loringhoven in Fountain. The Baroness, who was certainly not shy of controversy, seems never to have claimed to have been involved, even when she returned to New York and mixed in the same circles as Duchamp (she later modelled nude for a film he attempted to make with Man Ray), and it seems improbable that she would have not have vaunted her creation of a work that had caused such a flurry of press interest, particularly if it was associated in many people's minds with Duchamp. It perhaps should be noted that Duchamp spent much of his life quietly helping many other artists, and any suggestion that he would claim the work of another as his own runs completely counter to the high esteem in which he was held by artist friends. When he discussed his work with Breton in 1935, it seems improbable that he would have risked claiming Fountain to be part of his oeuvre at a time when so many who had been in New York in 1917 (and who also knew von Freytag-Loringhoven) would have been able to contradict him, had his authorship been in doubt in any way.

One such person was Man Ray, who had been on the organising committee of the Society of Independent Artists in 1917 and knew von Freytag-Loringhoven. In 1945, however, Man Ray referred in print to the story of Fountain without any qualification in an article he published in View magazine about his long friendship with Duchamp. Remembering how in 1917 Duchamp recovered Fountain from the Grand Central Palace where it had been temporarily stored behind a partition, he wrote: 'Grand Central: The very independent Richard Mutt robbed the vestals of their vespasienne in broad daylight and called it another day.' (Man Ray, 'Bilingual Biography', View, vol.5, no.1, March 1945, p.32.) To reflect the playful, transatlantic nature of their friendship, Man Ray used enigmatic phrasing that mixed French and English throughout the text. Here he used the French word vespasienne, meaning a structure or partition surrounding a urinal, for Fountain and talked alliteratively about 'vestals' (in classical times the guardians of the temple) to refer to those who were meant to guard the contents of the exhibition from such incursions. Having found where the piece was hidden, Duchamp had presumably been able to walk out of the Grand Central Palace with Fountain because none of the guards thought it an artwork.

As for the possible role of a woman in the work's submission, it is known from a careful decipherment of the address label that hangs from the urinal in Stieglitz's photograph that a woman was indeed implicated, though not as the creator of the piece. The details were those of Louise Norton (1890-1989), one of Duchamp's closest friends at the time and the author of a discursive article about the Fountain called '"Buddha of the Bathroom"' that appeared in the second issue of the Blind Man. ('To those who say Mr. Mutt's exhibit may be Art, but is the art of Mr. Mutt since a plumber made it? I reply simply that the Fountain was not made by a plumber but by the force of an imagination; and of imagination it has been said, "All men are shocked by it and some overthrown by it."' She added, 'there are those who anxiously ask, "Is he serious or is he joking?" Perhaps he is both! Is it not possible? ... there is among us to-day a spirit of blague [joke] arising out of the artist's bitter vision of an over-institutionalized world of stagnant statistics and antique axioms.' Louise Norton, '"Buddha of the Bathroom"', Blind Man, no.2, May 1917, p.6.) Significantly, in the days that followed the decision not to exhibit the Fountain the artist Charles Demuth wrote to Henry McBride, the art critic of the Sun, saying that the piece had been submitted 'by one of our friends' and asking if McBride would consider writing about the affair to give it more publicity. He added: 'P.S. If you wish any more information please phone, Marcel Duchamp, 4225 Columbus, or, Richard Mutte, 9255 Schuyler' (Camfield 1989, p.30). The telephone number given for the misspelt Richard Mutt was again that of Louise Norton. Although interviewed about Fountain late in her life, Louise Norton (or Louise Varèse, as she became) did not provide any new information about her involvement, and today nothing is known why her address appears on the label attached to Fountain or why her number was given to a journalist where information about Richard Mutt might be had. The gaps in knowledge about the details of her involvement in the submission of the piece to the society and its defence to the press do not materially affect Fountain 's status or meaning, but her role is a reminder of how in New York in spring 1917 Duchamp was not alone in seeking changes in how art was then thought of and practised.

Fountain tested beliefs about art and the role of taste in the art world. Interviewed in 1964, Duchamp said he had chosen a urinal in part because he thought it had the least chance of being liked (although many at the time did find it aesthetically pleasing). He continued: 'I was drawing people's attention to the fact that art is a mirage. A mirage, exactly like an oasis appears in the desert. It is very beautiful until, of course, you are dying of thirst. But you don't die in the field of art. The mirage is solid.' (Otto Hahn, 'Entretien Marcel Duchamp', Paris-Express, 23 July 1964, p.22.) Extensively studied and the subject of various interpretations, Fountain has continued to exert an extraordinary power over narratives of twentieth-century art in large part because of its piercing - if also humorous - questioning of the structures of belief and value associated with the concept of art.

Further reading
William Camfield, Marcel Duchamp: Fountain, Houston 1989.
Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, revised and expanded edition, New York 1997, pp.648-50.
Francis M. Naumann, The Recurrent, Haunting Ghost: Essays on the Art, Life and Legacy of Marcel Duchamp, New York 2012, pp.70-81.

Sophie Howarth
April 2000
Revised Jennifer Mundy
August 2015
Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you.

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'Fountain', Marcel Duchamp, 1917, replica 1964 | Tate

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Artwork page for 'Fountain', Marcel Duchamp, 1917, replica 1964 on display at Tate Modern. Fountain is the most famous of Duchamp's so-called ready-made sculptures: ordinary manufactured objects designated by the artist as works of art. It epitomises the assault on convention and accepted notions of art for which Duchamp became known.

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the art work is used as a symbol for the artist to express things like her foot fetish, every part of the artwork represents something personal to oppenheim. due to the sexual symbolisation many people felt it was inappropriate, particularly at the time, someone even broke and destroyed the artwork when it was being displayed.

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The artwork represents that something mundane could still be viewed as art, and it also represents the trend of consumerism (both in appreciation of it and in critique of it).