Dada was the early 20th-century art movement associated with everyday objects being presented as art, including Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain.
Dada emerged during World War I as an international avant-garde movement that rejected artistic tradition, rationality, and the cultural values many artists blamed for the war. It developed in places including Zurich, Berlin, Paris, and New York, using collage, absurd performances, chance, satire, and deliberately provocative objects.
Fountain, submitted by Duchamp in 1917, was a porcelain urinal signed “R. Mutt.” Duchamp called such works “readymades”: ordinary manufactured objects selected and repositioned by an artist. The point was that artistic choice and interpretation could matter as much as manual craftsmanship.
A common mix-up is calling Fountain Pop Art. Pop artists later embraced commercial imagery and mass culture, but Pop Art emerged mainly in the 1950s and 1960s. Surrealism also followed Dada and shared some interest in the irrational, yet Dada is the movement most directly linked with Duchamp’s readymades.