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Alfred Stieglitz. ‘Fountain.” 1917. Published in Blind Man 2, May 5, 1917.
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Photograph by Adam Aymor and Dr Lucy Thompson
Dr. Glyn Thompson at the Magic Chef Mansion, September 3, 2016.
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Photograph by Adam Aymor and Dr. Lucy Thompson
Magic Chef urinal: ‘Stiegltiz’ view. September 3, 2016.
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Photograph by Adam Aymor and Dr. Lucy Thompson
Magic Chef urinal: front view, August 2, 2015.
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Courtesy of Glyn Thompson
Eljer Co. Highest Quality Two-Fired Vitreous China Catalogue 1918, Bedfordshire urinal roughing-in diagrams, showing location of lugs half-way between the inlet and outlet.
Earlier this year, we published "The Richard Mutt Affair Meets the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition," an essay by Dr. Glyn Thompson, an art scholar based in Leeds, U.K. His thesis is that Marcel Duchamp didn't create "Fountain"—but rather his friend, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, did. And the physical evidence that proves the thesis? Dr. Thompson says it's here in St. Louis, at the Magic Chef Mansion, specifically in the first floor unisex bathroom. Thompson visited St. Louis earlier this month to see the urinal for himself—as it turns out, Francis Naumann, a scholar on the other side of the debate, made a pilgrimage to see it as well. Here's Thompson's update on the unfolding controversy over Duchamp's authorship of one of the 20th centuries most important art pieces.
At the end of my February 1 article (contemporaneous with a report of the same subject in The Jackdaw, No. 125, Jan/Feb. 2016), I predicted an earthquake in the Marcel Duchamp mythology industry. I can now inform the SLM readership that the first tremor occurred on August 10, with a visit to the Magic Chef Mansion of Duchamp scholar Francis Naumann, accompanied by your very own Bradley Bailey and the English artist, Tom Hackney (who recently exhibited paintings at the Chess Hall of Fame—transferred from Mr. Naumann’s gallery in New York—based on chess games played by Duchamp).
Readers may not be aware that Mr. Naumann was the first scholar to discuss in print the contents of a letter that Duchamp, in New York, wrote to his sister in Paris two days after a urinal had been rejected by the Independents on April 9, 1917. Subsequently attributed to Duchamp 17 years after its rejection, the urinal, photographed by Alfred Stieglitz on April 13, had been given the name Fountain—not by Duchamp, but the art critic Gustav Kobbe, in an article published in the New York Evening Herald on April 10.
In what seems par for the course in Duchamp commentary, this attribution, by Andre Breton, was not encumbered by any tedious corroborating evidence. Unfortunately for Mr. Naumann, the wording of Duchamp’s letter makes it quite clear that the sole individual alive in 1917 completely disqualified from having submitted this urinal was none other than himself: for in publishing the contents of the letter, in Affectuesuement, Marcel (Archives of American Art Journal, Vol. 22, No. 4, 1982), Mr. Naumann, offering no evidence whatsoever to substantiate his interpretation, declared Duchamp guilty of a deliberate deception, citing Duchamp’s statement verbatim, in translation:
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. The committee has decided to refuse to show this thing.
The trivial nature of “this thing,” according to Duchamp, is revealed in the introduction to his letter, “Impossible d’écrire,” meaning, figuratively, “There’s nothing much to write home about.” Naumann translated this, literally, as “Impossible to write,” which makes absolutely no sense, since to write is exactly what Duchamp then proceeded to do. On page 8 Naumann commented as follows:
The object that Duchamp submitted to the first exhibition [Note: i.e. the Independents of 1917] presented an open challenge to the very principle of the organization he had helped to establish. In this next letter to his sister – […] – he reported on the fate of his notorious submission.
However, since Duchamp had not submitted the urinal, he could not have been challenging anything. There is simply no countervailing evidence contradicting Duchamp’s April 11 observation, which remained unknown during the period in which the Duchamp myth was fabricated. That is, until it was discussed by Mr Naumann, whose weakness is revealed in his use of the adverb “apparently.” He simply disbelieved Duchamp’s inconvenient evidence, a scholarly peccadillo he never confessed, but compounded with more airy fancies, in note 20 on page 18:
This is our first knowledge of the fact that Duchamp originally intended this work to have been submitted by a woman, and it’s curious that at this time he does not even acknowledge to his sister that the entry was actually his own. Apparently Duchamp kept this identity a closely guarded secret until later in the month, after the appearance of The Blind Man magazine, where the item in question was first provided an adequate public defense.
There is simply no evidence that Duchamp intended the work to be submitted by a woman—nor any other life form, including himself—for any reason whatsoever. And since he hadn’t submitted it, his failure to acknowledge the fact was not curious, but banal. That he had an identity to conceal, Blind Man 2 failed utterly to confirm, along with any “secret,” or hidden “truth.” Nevertheless, thanks to Mr. Naumann and his sedulous followers, Duchamp’s 1917 testimony—the only forensic evidence admissible to the tribune of art history—has been dismissed as a lie due to its inconvenience to the prevailing master narrative initially fabricated in ignorance of its existence.
A further problem for Mr. Naumann is that the Magic Chef urinal confirms that the example that Duchamp falsely claimed—but not until 1964—to have submitted could not have been purchased from the “Mott Company,” as Duchamp described the J. L. Mott Iron Works at 118-120 Fifth Avenue, New York, since that which appears in Stieglitz’s iconic image had been manufactured in 1917 by the Trenton Potteries Company. My latest research in St. Louis confirms that the apparent discrepancies in size and proportion between the “Stieglitz” and Magic Chef examples of the same make and model (noted in a comment to the February article) are due almost entirely to the difference in the properties of the lenses used in two photographs taken almost 100 years apart, and the focal length and aperture of that used by Stieglitz compressing the foreground and background, an effect observable in the disproportionate apparent thickness of the rim and the apparent greater relative size of the truncated integral strainer (the triangle of six drain holes).
This effect is demonstrated by the illusion of the lugs attached to the sides of the urinal lying parallel with the inlet (in the foreground). As can be seen from the accompanying photograph, the lugs were, as was the universal custom, actually located halfway between the top and bottom of the urinal, not at the “front” where the inlet appears in Stieglitz’s image. That is, Stieglitz’s lens compressed the rim of the base, integral strainer, lugs and inlet into a shallower visual field than they occupy in reality. And the difference in the two profiles of the base is the result of a two-inch difference in the depth of the same model manufactured eleven years apart, in 1906 (Magic Chef) and 1917 (Stieglitz) the latter being two inches shorter at eleven and a half inches, making that profile, appearing as the “back” in Stieglitz’ photograph, more squat, as in reality. For this reason there would be no point in Mr. Naumann attempting to reproduce exactly Stieglitz’s photograph using the latter’s Eastman View Camera No. 2-D and the Magic Chef urinal.