Fountain, by Marcel Duchamp, is seen as a landmark of the 20th century avant garde, says Dalya Alberge in The Observer. Duchamp displayed an ordinary porcelain urinal, signed “R. Mutt”, at an exhibition in New York in 1917. As a result, many laud him as the father of conceptual art, and others damn him as “a charlatan responsible for the demise of traditional artistry”. But now, new research by Glyn Thompson, an art historian, suggests that Fountain could not have been Duchamp’s idea; and that he stole it from a German Dada artist, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. The theory has been aired before, but art historians rejected it on the grounds that Freytag-Loringhoven would have claimed authorship, given how famous Fountain became. However, Thompson claims to have confirmed it by proving…
