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She was convinced her mother died because her tyrannical father failed to treat his venereal disease. The baroness’s devout mother died of uterine cancer. 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. She created God, a plumbing trap as artwork, once attributed to Morton Schamberg, now to both of them. She poked fun at William Carlos Williams by calling him WC. She relished scatological jokes and made frequent references to plumbing in her poems: “Iron – my soul – cast iron!” “Marcel Dushit”. She collected pipes and spouts and drains. She paraded her mutts on the sidewalks of Greenwich Village. 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 for the piece and authorise replicas.ĭuchamp said he had purchased the urinal from JL Mott Ironworks Company, adapting Mutt from Mott, but the company did not manufacture the model in the photograph, so his story cannot be true. R Mutt was identified as an artist living in Philadelphia, which is where she was living at the time. 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”. 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. In the novel, I quote a 1917 letter Duchamp wrote to his sister, Susanne. 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.įountain, the famous porcelain urinal. 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”.
![r mutt 1917 r mutt 1917](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/16/d2/23/16d223aa70df2e8c581a82bd76ff77ea.jpg)
In 2004 it was voted the most influential modern artwork of all time.īut 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.
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The thing vanished, but conceptual art was born. Duchamp, a member of the board, resigned. The story goes like this: Marcel Duchamp, brilliant inventor of the “ready-made” and “anti-retinal art”, submitted Fountain, a urinal signed R Mutt, to the American Society of Independent Artists in 1917. Ironically, these enduring associations become all the more important when the artwork in question is a urinal – a pee pot for men. They are often subliminal, and they are emotionally charged. The chains are hierarchical, man on top and woman on bottom. 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. Masculinity has a purifying effect, femininity a polluting one. Paintings, novels and philosophy made by men feel more elevated somehow, more serious, while works by women feel flimsier and more emotional. W 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.