A standard white porcelain urinal, laid on its back and signed “R. Mutt,” submitted in 1917 to the Society of Independent Artists in New York and rejected by a committee Duchamp himself sat on. The original vanished within weeks and survives only in Alfred Stieglitz's photograph; the objects in museums today are authorized replicas Duchamp had fabricated in the 1960s, one of which is at Tate Modern. Fountain is the founding readymade — the work that shifted art's definition from craft to designation, and the ancestor of conceptual art, appropriation, and nearly every avant-garde gesture that followed.
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