The subheading on Siri Hustvedt’s article (A woman in the men’s room, Review, 30 March) says: “Evidence suggests the famous urinal Fountain, attributed to Marcel Duchamp, was actually found and signed by a forgotten female poet and artist? Why won’t the art world accept it?”
The art world doesn’t accept it because the argument is based on a number of false premises. Hustvedt is free in her novel to create a fictional account of the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven’s activities, but in the welcome aim of restoring agency to women artists and poets it is a pity that she chooses the baroness rather than the other women in the New York avant garde who were involved in the 1917 Fountain incident and who are no less forgotten by history: Louise Norton and Beatrice Wood.
Norton (who later married Edgar Varèse) was the “female friend”, to quote Duchamp’s letter to his sister, who sent in Fountain to the Society of Independent Artists exhibition. After Fountain was refused by the exhibition board, a little magazine, The Blind Man – edited by Wood, Henri-Pierre Roché and Duchamp – publicised the scandal. Wood wrote the famous unsigned defence of Fountain, “The Richard Mutt case”, and Norton the justifying essay, “Buddha of the bathroom”. Other contributors to the magazine include Clara Tice and Mina Loy.
Had the baroness been involved we would know of it, as this was a public if temporarily anonymous/pseudonymous incident. (She was later prominent in New York Dada.) So Duchamp plotted the coup with a female accomplice, but this was not the baroness. The urinal squats firmly in the radical genre of the “readymade” invented by Duchamp, its particular character related to the very feminist character of the New York avant garde at the time.
Prof Dawn Ades
London
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