The title of Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 readymade that is a urinal is Fountain. The work consisted of a porcelain urinal signed “R. Mutt,” a pseudonym Duchamp used when it was submitted to the Society of Independent Artists exhibition in New York.
Fountain was presented upside down and displaced from its ordinary plumbing function. Duchamp’s “readymade” idea challenged the assumption that art had to be handmade: an artist could transform an everyday object through selection, context, and title. The Society’s rules promised to display submitted works, but the committee concealed or rejected Fountain, making the controversy part of its history.
The original object was lost soon afterward. Alfred Stieglitz photographed it, and that image became the main record of the 1917 work. Duchamp later approved replicas, including versions now held by major museums.
Although some scholars debate whether Duchamp alone created or submitted the urinal, Fountain remains the canonical answer and one of the defining works of twentieth-century conceptual art.