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Books A woman in the men's room: when will Advertisement

the art world recognise the real artist

behind Duchamp's Fountain?
Evidence suggests the famous urinal Fountain, attributed to SCOPRI L'OFFERTA
SCOPRI L'OFFERTA
Marcel Duchamp, was actually created by Baroness Elsa von
Freytag=Loringhoven. Why haven’t we heard of her, asks Siri SCOPRI L'OFFERTA
Hustvedt

Siri Hustvedt
Fri 29 Mar 2019 13.00 GMT

6,037

W
Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven: an insurrectionist inspiration. Photograph: Bettmann Archive

hy is it hard for people to accept the intellectual and creative

authority of artists and writers who are women? Why did Lee
Krasner’s obvious influence on Jackson Pollock go
unrecognised for decades? Why was Simone de Beauvoir’s
original thought attributed to Jean-Paul Sartre? Why did it take centuries for
art historians to recognise the canvases of the Italian baroque painter
Artemisia Gentileschi as hers, not her father’s, even those that were signed
by her? I don’t believe the people involved in these attributions were all
monsters out to destroy the reputation of the artist or thinker. The evidence
was there. They couldn’t see it. Why?

Paintings, novels and philosophy made by men feel more elevated somehow,
more serious, while works by women feel flimsier and more emotional.
Masculinity has a purifying effect, femininity a polluting one. The chain of
associations that infect our thought dates back to the Greeks in the west:
male, mind-intellect, high, hard, spirit, culture as opposed to female, body,
emotion, soft, low, flesh, nature. The chains are hierarchical, man on top and
woman on bottom. They are often subliminal, and they are emotionally
charged. Ironically, these enduring associations become all the more Most viewed
important when the artwork in question is a urinal – a pee pot for men. Up to 100 UK children a
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Un amore di… Learn More per il regalo… Learn More Von der Leyen says UK
The story goes like this: Marcel Duchamp, brilliant inventor of the “ready- vaccine rollout is
'speedboat' compared with
made” and “anti-retinal art”, submitted Fountain, a urinal signed R Mutt, to
EU's big ship
the American Society of Independent Artists in 1917. The piece was rejected.
Duchamp, a member of the board, resigned. Alfred Stieglitz photographed it.
The thing vanished, but conceptual art was born. In 2004 it was voted the
most influential modern artwork of all time.

But what if the person behind the urinal was not Duchamp, but the German-
born poet and artist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874-1927)? She
appears in my most recent novel, Memories of the Future, as an
insurrectionist inspiration for my narrator. One reviewer of the novel
described the baroness as “a marginal figure in art history who was a raucous
‘proto-punk’ poet from whom Duchamp allegedly stole the concept for his
urinal”. It is true that she was part of the Dada movement, published in the
Little Review with Ezra Pound, Djuna Barnes, TS Eliot, Mina Loy and James
Joyce and has been marginalised in art history, but the case made in my
book, derived from scholarly sources enumerated in the acknowledgements,
is not that Duchamp “allegedly stole the concept for his urinal” from Von
Freytag-Loringhoven, but rather that she was the one who found the object,
inscribed it with the name R Mutt, and that this “seminal” artwork rightly
belongs to her.

In the novel, I quote a 1917 letter Duchamp wrote to his

sister, Susanne. I took the translation directly from Irene
Gammel’s excellent biography of Von Freytag-
Loringhoven, Baroness Elsa: “One of my female friends
who had adopted the masculine pseudonym Richard
Mutt sent me a porcelain urinal as a sculpture.” I got it
wrong. Glyn Thompson, an art scholar and indefatigable
champion of the baroness as the brain behind the urinal,
pointed out to me that Duchamp wrote “avait envoyé”
not “m’a envoyé” – “sent in”, not “sent me”. R Mutt was
identified as an artist living in Philadelphia, which is
where she was living at the time. In 1935 André Breton
attributed the urinal to Duchamp, but it wasn’t until
1950, long after the baroness had died and four years
after Stieglitz’s death, that Duchamp began to take credit
Fountain, the famous porcelain urinal.
Photograph: AP
for the piece and authorise replicas.

Duchamp said he had purchased the urinal from JL Mott Ironworks Advertisement

Company, adapting Mutt from Mott, but the company did not manufacture
the model in the photograph, so his story cannot be true. Von Freytag-
Loringhoven loved dogs. She paraded her mutts on the sidewalks of
Greenwich Village. She collected pipes and spouts and drains. She relished
scatological jokes and made frequent references to plumbing in her poems:
“Iron – my soul – cast iron!” “Marcel Dushit”. She poked fun at William
Carlos Williams by calling him WC. She created God, a plumbing trap as
artwork, once attributed to Morton Schamberg, now to both of them.
Gammel notes in her book that R Mutt sounds like Armut, the word for
poverty in German, and when the name is reversed it reads Mutter – mother.
The baroness’s devout mother died of uterine cancer. She was convinced her
mother died because her tyrannical father failed to treat his venereal disease.
(The uterine character of the upside-down urinal has long been noted.) And
the handwriting on the urinal matches the handwriting Von Freytag-
Loringhoven used for her poems.

All this and more appears in Gammel’s biography. All this and more
reappears in my novel. All the evidence has been painstakingly reiterated in
numerous articles and, as part of the Edinburgh festival fringe, Glyn
Thompson and Julian Spalding, a former director of Glasgow Museums,
mounted the 2015 exhibition A Lady’s Not a Gent’s, which presented the
factual and circumstantial evidence for reattribution of the urinal to Von
Freytag-Loringhoven.

The museums, including the Tate, have not budged. The standard Fountain
narrative with Duchamp as hero goes on. I am convinced that if the urinal
had been attributed to the baroness from the beginning, it would never have
soared into the stratosphere as a work of consummate genius. Women are
rarely granted such status, but the present reputation of Fountain, one that
was hardly instantaneous but grew slowly over the course of many decades,
has made the truth embarrassing, not to speak of the money involved and
the urgent need to rewrite history. The evidence is there. They can’t or won’t
see it. Why?

Lee Krasner in New York, c 1940. Photograph: The Jewish Museum

Expectation is the better part of perception, most of it unconscious. Past Advertisement

experience determines how we confront the world in the present.

Prejudgment and stereotyping are part of cognition, but those preordained
ideas – authority is masculine, for example – are cultural. Most people know
about implicit bias. The media are full of it. Take the implicit association test
to see if you are a racist or sexist. But as Perry Hinton put it: “The implicit
stereotypical associations picked up by an individual do not reflect a
cognitive bias but the associations prevalent in their culture – evidence of
‘culture in mind’.” We need “gut feelings”, but we also devise post hoc
explanations for them: “Certainly, Freytag-Loringhoven had created broadly
similar scatological works but nothing that held the thinking expressed in
Duchamp’s piece.” I lifted this sentence from an online article at
Phaidon.com called The Fascinating Tale of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain. I
quote it in the novel. The writer does not explain what he means by
“thinking” or why works by the baroness lack thought.

To open oneself to any work – a sculpture, a book of literature or philosophy

– is to acknowledge the authority behind it. When the spectator or reader is a
man and the artist or thinker is a woman, this simple act of recognition can
give rise to bad feelings of emasculation, what I call “the yuck factor” – the
unpleasant sensation of being dragged down into fleshy feminine muck. But
because the feelings are automatic, they may never be identified and can
Siri Hustvedt: ‘I’m
easily be explained away: she couldn’t think. She was a wild woman who
writing for my life’
wore tin cans for a bra. She turned her body into Dada. In 1913, she picked a
Read more rusted ring off the street, a found object, and named it Enduring Ornament, a
year before Duchamp’s first readymade, Bottle Rack, but she wasn’t thinking.
She couldn’t have influenced him. She was emotional, out of control – crazy.
Duchamp, on the other hand, was dry, witty, a chess-playing genius of pure
conceptual mind, a hero of high culture.

The baroness called herself “art aggressive.” She celebrated and elevated
bodily machinery, rejoiced in verbal hijinks, and pitied Duchamp for
devolving into “cheap, bluff, giggle frivolity”. She played with the outrage,
contempt and disgust she incited. She wrote: “You forget, madame – that we
are the masters – go by our rules.” She broke the rules. The evidence is there.
She sent in the urinal. It’s time to rewrite the story.

• Memories of the Future by Siri Hustvedt is published by Hodder & Stoughton

at £18.99. Buy it for £16.71 at guardianbookshop.com.

• This article was amended on 1 April 2019 to replace the main image, which
due to a captioning error wrongly claimed to show Elsa von Freytag-
Loringhoven.

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