Siri Hustvedt's Tight Case for Baroness Elsa as Founder of Duchamp's 'Fountain'

Siri Hustvedt makes a case, a plea, for the art world to take seriously the idea that Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (who appears in Hustvedt's most recent novel, Memories of the Future, as "an insurrectionist inspiration for [the] narrator"), was the "creator" of Duchamp's "Fountain," at The Guardian. The case made in the book is as follows; it is "not that Duchamp 'allegedly stole the concept for his urinal' from Von Freytag-Loringhoven, but rather that she was the one who found the object, inscribed it with the name R Mutt, and that this 'seminal' artwork rightly belongs to her." More:

Duchamp said he had purchased the urinal from JL Mott Ironworks Company, adapting Mutt from Mott, but the company did not manufacture the model in the photograph, so his story cannot be true. Von Freytag-Loringhoven loved dogs. She paraded her mutts on the sidewalks of Greenwich Village. She collected pipes and spouts and drains. She relished scatological jokes and made frequent references to plumbing in her poems: “Iron – my soul – cast iron!” “Marcel Dushit”. She poked fun at William Carlos Williams by calling him WC. She created God, a plumbing trap as artwork, once attributed to Morton Schamberg, now to both of them. Gammel notes in her book that R Mutt sounds like Armut, the word for poverty in German, and when the name is reversed it reads Mutter – mother. The baroness’s devout mother died of uterine cancer. She was convinced her mother died because her tyrannical father failed to treat his venereal disease. (The uterine character of the upside-down urinal has long been noted.) And the handwriting on the urinal matches the handwriting Von Freytag-Loringhoven used for her poems.

Please read on at The Guardian.