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| Fountain by R. Mutt Photo: Alfred Stieglitz |
When about half way through I read this:
"[Duchamp's] apotheosis was consummated in 1999 when the Tate Gallery bought his urinal, called Fountain, for $500,000, to celebrate the century of art they thought he'd done so much to create. Unfortunately for the Tate, the urinal wasn't his. The latest research . . . has now proved beyond any shadow of reasonable doubt -- that the urinal wasn't submitted to the Society of Independents exhibition in New York by Duchamp but by the redoubtable Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven." [emphases mine]
Wait . . . What?? Forget the Hirst/Spalding spat! Who the heck was Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven? If what Spalding claimed was true, why wasn't that the headline? I needed to dig deeper.
Spalding cites two sources to back up his claim, Irene Gammel and Dr. Glyn Thompson. I immediately ordered a copy of Gammel's 2002 cultural biography Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity and began to read about this amazing, overlooked artist and poet who was light years ahead of her time.
Born Elsa Plötz in 1874, the future Baroness arrived in Berlin in 1893 ready to experience life in the extreme. Gammel writes:
" In a dazzling odyssey of sexual roles and experimentations she now began to armor her personality, emerging as a tough sexual and artistic warrior in her conquest of the modern city. Her ambivalence as androgyne allowed her to test a stunning range of erotically charged positions -- young ingenue, female flâneur, erotic art worker, priapic traveler, chorus girl cum prostitute, actress, cross-dresser, lesbian, and syphilitic patient -- all in a span of just a few years."
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| Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven |
The flamboyant Elsa eventually follows her second husband to America after faking his suicide to escape creditors. When he leaves her in 1913, she makes her way to New York City, the same year as the Armory Show in which Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase becomes a succès de scandale.
Now 40 years old, Elsa Plötz Endell Greve marries Leopold Karl Friedrich Baron von Freytag-Loringhoven (a short-lived union) and the Baroness is born. On the way to the wedding Elsa finds an iron ring on the street and calls it Enduring Element, her first piece of found-object art. This is a full two years before Duchamp and Picabia arrive in New York and Duchamp coins the term "ready-mades."
Elsa plunged headfirst into New York's avant-garde artistic circles. When she met Duchamp, 13 years her junior, she immediately fell in love and began her pursuit of him. Duchamp resisted her advances, causing her to refer to him as her "platonic lover." The two lived in the same apartment building for a time and were well acquainted.
The key piece of evidence in Gammel's compelling case for why the urinal may have been Elsa's is a letter Duchamp wrote to his sister in April 1917 in which he states:
"One of my female friends who had adopted the pseudonym Richard Mutt sent a porcelain urinal as a sculpture; since there was nothing indecent about it, there was no reason to reject it." (When he speaks of not rejecting the urinal, Duchamp is referring to the fact that he was a board member of the Society of Independent Artists who chose work for the exhibition.)
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As for Spalding's other source, Dr. Glyn Thompson, I wasn't able to find anything published except an online PDF of a 2008 doctoral thesis for the History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds School of Fine Art, titled Unwinding Duchamp: Mots et Paroles à Tous les Étages.
It is well beyond the limits of my time to read Thompson's entire thesis, so I tried keyword searches ("urinal," "fountain," "baroness," "elsa," "freytag-loringhoven.") to see if I could find the corroborating evidence Spalding cites. I couldn't.
Given the urinal's enormous influence twentieth-century art, I would very much like to know Spalding's further substantiation that "has now proved beyond any shadow of reasonable doubt" that the Baroness, and not Duchamp, was responsible for the iconic urinal. If you know of this evidence, you can email me at jane@offrampgallery.com and I'll report it in a future column.
Is Spalding right when he claims "Duchamp stole the idea from, of all people, a woman to cement his reputation. He then commissioned a set of replicas to sell -- cast of a copy of a found object! They sit like thrones in the major collections of modern art around the world." If Spalding is right, how does this alter your view of Duchamp and his legacy?
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Well, this looks to be a pisser of a revelation. It is redolent of the same pall that hangs over such relationships as Kandinsky and Munter, or Pollock and Krasner (and I'm sure other, though perhaps less prominent, examples as well). The Baroness should be credited if this truly was her creation.
ReplyDeleteStill, Duchamp was (aside from the provenance of the pissoir) a canny manipulator of perception and presentation. Appropriating the attribution of R. Mutt to himself would then be part of his larger (though in this case, ethically troubling) context.
Another DaDa joke. What else is new!
ReplyDeletePossibly
more facts, history, & reality created by those in power, on the board, with the money...
or of the right sex or nationality
...for their convenience or fun. HA.
Thanks for digging, Jane.
Perhaps you needed to have have dug a little deeper! Amelia Jone's 2005 book on the Baroness "Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada" discusses the entire "debate" which is, as Jones describes, undecidable. But the issue of authorship is something that would perhaps have been irrelevant to both Duchamp and the Baroness; it matters only to those concerned with lineage and provenance.
ReplyDeleteWell, to really solve the issue, we would have to track down the factory worker that originally imbued the object with the magical aura that the Baroness or Duchamp were eventually able, due to their perceptual genius, to discern. After all, they had both seen other urinals in their lifetime, but this one was special. But as usual, the blue collar classes never get the credit.
ReplyDeleteIf the issue of authorship was truly irrelevant to Duchamp, why would he bother claiming it at all, as he surely did after the Baroness died?
ReplyDeleteYes, thank you for digging.
Quite; nice to come across some common sense for a change.
DeleteIf Spalding is right...(the original question) then Duchamp's legacy is more far more clear and a bit less interesting to me. His concept of ready-mades being chosen for their inherent lack of meaning definitely conflicts with the context of the urinal.
ReplyDelete