Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain"

No discussion of Duchamp's art would be complete without reference to the sundry trends and styles of modernism and postmodernism. And no account of Duchamp's Fountain can be considered complete that does not include reference to the manner in which his output as a whole both proceeds and departs from various trends. Indeed, the cultural context for the creation of Fountain as a work of modern art is as important to an understanding of it as is the fact of context as an aesthetic feature of the artifact.

It is a commonplace that modernism as an aesthetic category was a response to the representational conventions of Romanticism and classicism. Duchamp, born in 1887, was a youthful artistic contemporary of the late impressionists and postimpressionists, who were moving beyond representation and toward abstraction, beyond impression and toward expression. But whereas artistic currents such as Fauvism, Cubism, abstract expressionism, and the like attracted critical attention and the work of many artists in their own right, Duchamp as an individual artist very much moved beyond movements, currents, categories. It has been noted tha

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public defense." This was confirmed by Duchamp himself, who explained that the raison d'être of The Blind Man was above all a matter of justifying the 'Fountain-Urinal'" (Cabanne/Duchamp 56). The fate of the original Fountain is unknown; it seems to have disappeared from Stieglitz's studio not long after it was photographed there, thus making Stieglitz's photograph the main tangible record of the original. In later years, Duchamp would inscribe replicas, not all of which were authorized, though he was strongly discouraged from doing so by his agent in order to protect the commercial value of his works (Naumann 245). Duchamp claimed to have no particular interest in the commercial aspects of art, claiming that he never knew the price of any of his works (Cabanne 257). But this did not prevent readymades in general and Fountain in particular from exerting enormous influence on the course of the art that followed over the course of the 20th century. The evidence of criticism of Duchamp's readymades is that, by and large, they are viewed not only as art but as important aesthetic statements. According to Tancock, this was not because of the intrinsic quality, shape, or other accidental attribute of the work but rather because of th
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Approximate Word count = 3205
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page)

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