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Photograph by Adam Aymor
The Magic Chef urinal.
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Photograph by Adam Aymor
Underside of the Magic Chef urinal. It reads "Trenton Potteries Company."
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Photograph by Adam Aymor
The author's daughter, Dr. Lucy Thompson, posing with the Magic Chef Mansion urinal.
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Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Photograph of "Fountain," by Alfred Stieglitz as it appeared in "The Blind Man" No. 2, page 4. Editors: Henri-Pierre Roche, Beatrice Wood, and Marcel Duchamp. Published in New York, May 1917.
Several weeks ago, St. Louis woke up to the news, brought to them by Robert Duffy and Kelly Moffit of St. Louis Public Radio, of an extraordinary meeting of the world of avant-garde art and the industrial history of St Louis, in the fabric of the U-Haul Building, formerly the Offices of the Magic Chef Manufacturing Company. But little did they suspect then what they are about to learn now—that this remarkable coincidence, in which Isamu Noguchi met the American Stove Co. in 1948, had been anticipated across town 40 years before, in 1908, in the fabric of the Stockstrom House, aka the Magic Chef Mansion. For, as recent research confirms, in the first floor unisex toilet of the magnificent residence on Russell resides a surviving example of the model, and make, of the urinal that, on April 9, was submitted to, and rejected from, the first exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, held between April 10 and May 6, 1917 at the Grand Central Palace on Lexington Avenue, New York City. This gesture, eventually credited to Marcel Duchamp, was to become the most influential work of art of the 20th century. Unfortunately for Marcel Duchamp, the Magic Chef urinal, which unlike its sibling of 1917 miraculously survived, proves conclusively that when he finally claimed in the 1960s responsibility for the Independents submission, he was, to be generous, editing his past in order to curate his legacy. In other words, he was lying, for what in 1964, ’66, and’67 he claimed he had done in 1917 would, as any plumber knows, have been impossible.
The importance of the Magic Chef urinal was contemplated, theoretically, in 1990 by the late Kirk Varnedoe of the Museum of Modern Art, and Adam Gopnik, thus:
One of the nicer twists of history’s perversity is that, while the Duchamp Fountain exists in numerous replica versions, a surviving example of the type of urinal has proven impossible to locate. If it exists at all, it is now an item of exquisite rarity.
You can bet the house on that—and it’s in St. Louis, as a result of the Louisiana Purchase exposition of 1904, in which a number of leading manufacturers of plumbing fixtures exhibited sanitary wares. Three won prestigious prizes: the N. O. Nelson Mfg. Co. of St. Louis; the Standard Sanitary Mfg. Co. of Pittsburgh; and the Trenton Potteries Company, New Jersey. Sanitary fixtures made by the latter two firms were chosen for the Magic Chef Mansion by Charles Stockstrom, who visited the exposition, and sourced by his architect Ernst C. Janssen. These included a vitreous earthenware flat back Bedfordshire lipped urinal, manufactured by the Trenton Potteries Co. Meticulous forensic research has established that it corresponds in every detail to the urinal that was submitted to the Independents and photographed by Alfred Stieglitz, on April 13. But two days after the urinal had been rejected Duchamp wrote to his sister in Paris, informing her that not he but a female friend had submitted it. This was not known until 1982, by which time the submission had been attributed to Duchamp, based not on actual evidence but fiction reiterated into dogma. The inability of the Duchamp critical industry to acknowledge this has prevented his evidence from being accorded the authority it demands.
Duchamp’s attribution was based on the flimsiest of tissues, internally logically inconsistent and mutually contradictory parabolic rigmaroles that he gave in the last four years of his life. The surviving example of the model that Stieglitz photographed in 1917 proves that what these accounts claimed simply could not have happened, for the system whereby sanitary fixtures were manufactured, marketed and distributed across the U.S. at this time made Duchamp’s 1960s claim, that he had bought the urinal from the J. L. Mott Iron Works, at Fifth Avenue and Seventeenth in New York City, impossible, for this was set of showrooms, dedicated, as every native-born American knows, to display, not retail sales, and everything that Mott’s sold they manufactured themselves. But the system that made Duchamp’s 1960s fantasy a fiction had also made, in 1917, the purchase of a urinal as easy as falling off a log for the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, in Philadelphia: Duchamp had attributed the submission to this female friend in his letter; all the press coverage of the affair domiciled the author of the urinal in the Quaker City, where the only female friend of Duchamp’s capable of conceiving and executing the submission—the only one with weapon, motive and opportunity—just happened to be. All she had to do was stroll into one of the multitude of German-speaking master plumber’s establishments, and in her native tongue, and perhaps their local German dialect, buy the lowest-grade, and most common, model of urinal, transport it to the railroad station, and ship it, still in its crate, to Louise Norton in New York, from whose address it arrived at the Grand Central Palace on April 9, Easter Monday, with a label attached to it in different handwriting to that on the urinal itself, neither examples of which were Duchamp’s. The rest is (the greatest miscarriage of justice in art) history.
Another of the many remarkable coincidences in this extraordinary story is that today the Schloss Schwerin, in Northern Germany, on which the exterior of the Magic Chef Mansion was modelled by Janssen, now contains of a collection of works by—you’ve guessed it—Marcel Duchamp.
The odds against the survival of any model of urinal from 1908 are astronomical: those on that model being the same as that submitted to the Independents, more so; the odds that it should be found at all are simply off the scale of probability. Yet there it is, on Russell Boulevard. So what this chance encounter in St. Louis demonstrates is that whilst modern art has lost its imposter French grandfather and Germany has regained its authentic godmother, St. Louis is about to become the epicenter of the biggest earthquake in the history of modern art.
Glyn Thompson is an independent scholar, curator and writer living in the Lake District of the UK. Most recently he co-curated the exhibition A Lady’s Not A Gents at Summmerhall, Edinburgh (August-September 2015), Educating Damien at the Tetley, Leeds (Spring 2014), Duchamp’s Emerald Tablet, in the Special Collections of the University of Leeds, with Flora Thompson, (Spring 2010), and Jemandem ein R Mutt’s Zeugnis Ausstellen, Monsieur Goldfinch, at the City of Leeds Art Gallery (2008). He writes regularly for The Jackdaw Magazine and Art-Critical. He will publish, in the autumn, with Liz Stainforth,“Curatorial Translation: The Case of Marcel Duchamp’s Green Box” in the Journal of Curatorial Studies. He has also been published on Jane Chafin’s Offramp Gallery Blog and in the Huffington Post. He taught for 25 years at Jacob Kramer College, Leeds, and for five years at the University of Leeds. He was from 1997 to 2001 the chef-patron at In Vino Veritas, Leeds, home of the Café Scientifique, whose first guest speaker was Olivers Sachs, and whose last was Carl Djerassi. In between it hosted, among others, Alan Sokal. His doctoral thesis, “Unwinding Duchamp: Mots et Paroles à Tous les Étages,” has been published by the University of Leeds (2009).
An electronic copy of Duchamp’s Urinal? The Facts Behind the Façade can be obtained from the Wild Pansy Press at store.leeds.ac.uk.
