Controversial artwork to star in capital exhibition

Published on Sunday 4 July 2010 15:42

NEARLY a century after it became a milestone in modern art, Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, an upturned urinal, goes on show in Edinburgh for the first time this weekend - and still has the power to shock.

Signed "R Mutt 1917", Fountain is regarded as one of the 20th century's most important artworks and is a highlight of Another World, a major show of surrealist art at the National Galleries of Scotland, one of about 100 loans to the summer exhibition.

Senior curator Patrick Elliott said: "It's nearly 100 years old, and it's still one of the works that people look at and think 'What the hell is that, or this is a disgrace, that's not art'.

"I think it will provoke that sort of reaction probably far more than a Damien Hirst piece, and yet it's made in 1917."

Another World, filling the entire Dean Gallery, includes work by household names such as Salvador Dali, Ren Magritte, and Joan Miro. About 300 framed artworks include almost all the gallery's own holdings of Surrealist art, along with Surrealist and associated works borrowed from across the UK as well as Switzerland and France.

Major loans range from Dali's Exploding Raphaelesque Head, of a classical bust exploding into hundreds of pieces, to little known British Surrealists like Ithell Colquhoun, to Obstacle, a mobile of hundreds of coat hangers, by Man Ray, better known as a photographer.

Opening on 10 July, the show extends to artists influenced by the surrealists, including Scotland's Eduardo Paolozzi and Alan Davie.

In 1917 Duchamp submitted Fountain to the Society of Independent Artists exhibition in New York, signing it with an assumed name probably from the plumbing showroom where he bought it.

The society had promised to show work by anyone who paid a submission fee of $6, but they at first put the shocking object behind a partition and banished it altogether.

Fountain was one of his "readymades", in which Duchamp took ordinary or "found" objects and exhibited them as art. It may have been part practical joke, but it is now seen as paving the way for the work of contemporary art celebrities, such as Damien Hirst's sheep in formaldehyde, or Jeff Koons's use of vacuum cleaners or basketballs.

"It was questioning the nature of art, the meaning of art, the role of art," said Mr Elliott, who organised the Another World show. In art college surveys of the most important artist of the 20th century, he said, Duchamp has been known to come out ahead of Pablo Picasso.Duchamp's original Fountain was lost - probably thrown out - but was famously photographed by Alfred Stieglitz.

In 1964, as the work's fame grew, Duchamp had eight new porcelain versions made, now enshrined in galleries including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Pompidou Centre in Paris.

The version showing in Edinburgh is in the Tate's collection. It is described as a very male object which from the way Duchamp placed it begins to look female, and mixes sex and machinery.

"It's quite something to have made such a radical and offensive piece that is still offensive 100 years later," said Mr Elliott. "A urinal is loaded with associations. And it's funny as well. A lot of his work is funny." [e-mail]