Duchamp

I've started reading "What are you looking at" by Will Gompertz, the BBC's arts editor.

Chapter 1 is called "The Fountain, 1917" and starts off by dramatising the way Marcel Duchamp acquired his "readymade" urinal, which is widely considered to be the starting point of modern art.

Gompertz goes into a lot of detail, naming the two people with Duchamp -  Walter Arensberg, a wealthy supporter (who paid for the urinal) and Joseph Stella, another artist - and describing how they behaved in J.L. Mott Iron Works, the plumbers' merchant where it was supposedly bought.

All of this has put me in a quandary because I've only recently read "Con Art: Why you should sell your Damien Hirst" by Julian Spalding, who says this is baloney.   

According to Spalding, the person who bought the urinal in 1917 was Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.  Spalding says Duchamp claimed the idea as his own much later on, in the 1960s, when the Baroness had died, Duchamp had hoodwinked people into believing he was the founder of modern art and none of his own readymades cut it.   See my previous post. 

So, who's right?   

So far, my research has got me even more confused.  

Quite a lot of reputable organisations (the Tate, the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph among them)  have written similar accounts of Duchamp, Arensberg and Stella going for a stroll in Manhattan and buying the urinal at J.L.Mott Iron Works.  

But Wikipedia points to "another version" based on a letter Duchamp wrote to his sister in 1917.  In it, he (reportedly) wrote "One of my female friends who has adopted the pseudonym Richard Mutt sent me a porcelain urinal as a sculpture".   Wikipedia says Duchamp never identified the female friend but it was probably the Baroness or possibly Louise Norton, an American poet and literary editor (also supported by Arensberg).

Spalding's low opinion of Duchamp's own work isn't shared by the Guardian's Jonathan Jones (the author of an article slagging off a book written by some of the world's foremost art theorists, which I enjoyed).  In a 2008 article he calls Duchamp "the 20th century's cleverest artist".

Duchamp's first "readymade" ( a word he invented later)  was Bicycle Wheel, a spoked wheel in a metal fork fixed to the seat of a stool.  (This link is to a replica made by Duchamp in the 1950s - the original, like the urinal, was lost.)

 Jones wonders whether it's a reference to "The Cyclist", a 1913 painting by Jean Metzinger.  ( I think he might be referring to a 1912 picture entitled "At the Cycle-Race Track").  "You can't help thinking it means something, but interpretation is vain.  It just is.  It simply stands there in its light-hearted, loveable glory."

"This toy was a step into intellectual realms no one had entered before," writes Jones.

Actually, this really reminds me of the half-handlebar I submitted to an exhibition at Nottingham University - see my previous post. It stood on my coffee table provoking a similar sort of reaction - puzzlement, amusement, a feeling that it must signify something (in my case something obscene).  I must have pressed some buttons in the Fine Art department, unwittingly!

Jones acknowledges that Duchamp's  early paintings were nothing special but says he "eventually excelled as a painter".  His "Nude Descending a Staircase No 2" made him "famous in America" when it was shown in 1913.