The Fountain

Duchamp's first ready-made sculpture, shown in 1914, was an ordinary bottle-rack, which the artist had bought at a town-hall bazaar. Before it he had created a forerunner to Alexander Calder's mobiles by fastening a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool. Duchamp called it a 'distraction'. With these works Duchamp provoked a debate about the definition of art and originality, which such Pop artist as Andy Warhol and Jasper John in the own way continued. Duchamp's aim, as he once explained, was to "carry the mind of the spectator towards other regions, more verbal." The pure ready-made did not have any artistic qualities; the artist raised it to the category of a work of art by the act of choice. Duchamp's ideas had a great influence on the Dadaists. Bicycle Wheel, which he had made in 1913, was partly born from his fascination with mechanical movement. He also experimented with film and sound. For his Anemic Cinema (1926) Duchamp made a series of motorized discs. Duchamp's optical projects were not a success. In 1935 he managed to sell only one of his Rotoreliefs, a relief obtained by rotation.
In 1913-14 Duchamp worked as a librarian at the Bibliothèque Sainte Geneviève. Finding the atmosphere in Paris intolerable, Duchamp went to New York, where his friend Francis Picabia joined him in 1915. They were welcomed as the most celebrated representatives of avant-garde. Picabia was born into a wealthy family; he was a restless person, who lived wild, took opium, and spread the ideas of avant-garde through his publications. An art dealer offered in 1916 Duchamp $10,000 a year for his "entire production". Duchamp refused the offer. He worked in New York for some time as a librarian at the French Institute. During his stay he became friends with Man Ray, the poet William Carlos Williams and the composer Edgard Varèse. With Ray Duchamp published an almanac entitled New York Dada. Walter and Louise Arensberg, art patrons, began to collect Duchamp's art. Duchamp did not take any part in Picabia's magazine 291, which published Apollinaire's 'idéogrammes' and other art and poetry of the time, but in 1917 he published pamphlets in the magazines The Blind Man and Rongwrong.

In 1917 Ducamp sent an urinal, his famous Fountain, to the first annual exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, in which Duchamp himself was a founding member. However, the work was excluded and Duchamp resigned from the society. Later Duchamp recalled the incident as a turning point in his career: "So, that cooled me off so much that, as a reaction against such behavior coming from artists whom I had believed to be free. I got job. I became a librarian... " (Dialogues With Marcel Duchamp by Pierre Cabanne, 1987) The signature of Fountain, R.Mutt, referred to New York manufacturer of sanitary equipment, as if he were the creator of the work. "Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance," Duchamp or Beatrice Wood explained in an anonymous article in The Blind Man, a magazine created by Duchamp and his friends. "He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view - created a new thought for that object." After Fountain, the definition of art was nearly lost.