The Brooklyn Rail has a whole smorgasbord of Duchamp-related content tied to MoMA’s show. But my favorite still has to be the October 2022 recollections of art historian Carroll Janis, who was working alone in his family’s gallery one morning in 1950 when Duchamp came to sign the urinal Sidney Janis had procured for exhibition.
For the whole time this has been in my tabs, I’ve been thinking about the elaborate, almost performative way Duchamp approached this signing and designation. But as I was writing this, it occurred to me that Janis got the first [non-bôite] replica of Fountain in 33 years, not in New York, where the original supposedly came from, but in France: “[A]s no suitable replacement could be found in New York, Duchamp suggested that Janis look in Paris on his summer visit there at the Marché aux Puces (flea market). Janis found one and shipped it back to New York.”
He sure did, and it’s now in the Philadelphia Museum. And there’s a great museum photo of the underside, with the signature[s!] and the labels.
But now I think back on a whole thrumming history of Duchamp studies where incredulous scholars scoured the early 20th century porcelain fixture catalogues of the J.L. Mott Iron Works and beyond, failing to identify the exact model of urinal Duchamp said he picked up on Sixth Avenue. Why did Duchamp think or know a suitably identical urinal would be found in les puces? Did he get the first one in France, too?
Three Encounters With Marcel Duchamp [brooklynrail.org]