d come from Paris. That same year he styled himself an iconoclast who asserted "a complete reversal of art opinions" (d'Harnoncourt and McShine 15). He appears to have quickly become a major focus of avant-garde art in New York, becoming a founding member of the Society of Independent Artists, Inc., in 1916.
Duchamp's reputation as an established, daring, and respected artist, as well as the emerging environment of experimental, modernist art, can be seen as a core contextual element for any art that he might have produced in his New York Period. Thus it is possible to speculate that when in 1917 he submitted to a Society exhibition a readymade under the name of R. Mutt, and titled Fountain, he was making a project of anonymity, asserting the worthiness of the work in its own right and not as an attribute of his fame and respect. As Scammel points out (46), following Tomkins, Duchamp was marked by an "'indelible grace' which followed him in and out of . . . innumerable affairs and friendships." Naumann (72) explains that Duchamp enlisted the assistance o
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