The Urinal Controversy: Walter Pach & Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’

Founded by Morris, Gustavus and Gotthelf Pach, the photographic studio of Pach Brothers emerged in the wake of the Civil War. The family had moved from Berlin to the City of New York when the boys were young.

Sharing an interest in the emerging process of photography, they roamed the streets of their local neighborhood taking pictures of scenes and residents. The New York directory of 1866/7 lists the Pach Brothers working at 260 Bowery. A decade later they were operating from a studio on Broadway.

Pach Brothers specialized in portraiture and provided official images for political leaders (they were “house photographers” of the Roosevelt family).

The studio also monopolized the recording of university events and graduations at Yale, Harvard, Princeton and elsewhere. Upon recommendation of President Ulysses S. Grant, the brothers were appointed official military photographers at West Point.

A blaze in February 1895 destroyed their Broadway studio. According to press reports, there were thirty employees at work on the premises and twenty patrons sitting for portraits when the fire started in the negative retouching room. Nobody died, but the archive was lost.

The brothers immediately reconstructed their studio and continued photographing from that same location for more than fifteen years. Pach Brothers remained in business until the studio’s dissolution in 1994.

Walter Pach

Engagement with theatrical work began in the 1890s and a fascination with celebrities was a hallmark of the second generation of Pach photographers. Gotthelf’s son Alfred started work in 1903, eventually becoming the firm’s President. His younger son decided upon a different career path.

Born in the City of New York on July 11, 1883, young Walter Pach often accompanied his father on photographic assignments. As the firm was commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art to document their holdings, he spent many hours looking at paintings and sculptures.

He rated artistic expression higher than photography. Walter would become one of Manhattan’s early promoters of European modern art.

In 1903, he graduated from New York’s City College with a degree in art history and went on to study with Leigh Hunt and Robert Henri at the New York School of Art in Greenwich Village.

He also spent time in Paris at the Académie Paul Ranson. Between 1903 and 1910, Walter acted as agent for William Merritt Chase’s European Summer School, “commuting” between Montmartre and Manhattan. He settled permanently in Paris in 1907 and immersed himself in the city’s vanguard art circles.

Being introduced into the group of artists orbiting Gertrude and Leo Stein, he started exhibiting with them. Gertrude painted his portrait in 1908.

That same year, he published an article on Paul Cézanne in Scribner’s Magazine, the first American critic to pay attention to the artist. He also interviewed the Impressionist painter Claude Monet and published an essay about him in the same magazine.

A lot was happening in the art world at the time. The annual Salon in Paris was a state sanctioned exhibition for which a select circle of initiates judged the works that were submitted. It was the arbiter of French taste.

In 1884 a group of young artists rebelled and founded the Salon des Indépendants which was driven by ideals of artistic freedom and independence. There were no judges or juried awards and the shows were open to anyone. It was here that Marcel Duchamp exhibited his first works in 1909.

The following year a messy painting was exhibited by a Genoese artist named Joachim-Raphaël Boronali who was said to represent the mysteriously named Excessive movement. The work was titled “Et le soleil s’endormit sur l’Adriatique” (Sunset over the Adriatic).

The inclusion of the painting was a prank played out by the critic Roland Dorgelès who, with friends at the Montmartre cabaret club Le lapin agile, had attached a paintbrush to the tail of a donkey named Lolo, the house mascot.

They aimed at testing the democratic principles of the Salon of independent artists. How accessible was their Exhibition? If in principle anyone was free to submit work – then why not a donkey?

A sharp observer of the fast-moving and chaotic developments in the contemporary art sphere, the hoax made an impact on Duchamp’s thinking and determined some of his later activities.

Walter Pach became close to Duchamp as he was the only American artist to be accepted in the Section d’Or collective of Cubist painters and sculptors.

The group came to prominence in the wake of their controversial showing at the 1911 Salon des Indépendants which first brought Cubism to the attention of the public. Walter acted as an intermediary between Paris and New York City.

The Armory Show

Keen to promote American interest in Parisian artistic developments, Pach became a key figure in preparing the 1913 Armory Show, the first major international exhibition of modern art on American soil.

Held in New York City’s 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue, the artistic avant-garde (a military metaphor) found a suitable home in this vast setting. It became the battleground of Manhattan’s vanguard army with Walter Pach as its strategist.

Acting as a liaison for European artists living and working in Paris, he secured works by Henri Matisse, Odilon Redon, Marcel Duchamp and Constantin Brancusi for inclusion in the Exhibition. He knew most of these artists personally and they entrusted their work to him.

The impact of the Armory Show would inspire many young American painters and serve as a catalyst for artists in search of a distinct vocabulary of their own.

After marrying Dresden-born (portrait) painter Magda Frohberg in February 1914 and the birth of their son Raymond that same year, the couple settled in New York City where Walter continued his role as European “agent” bringing works by Georges Rouault, André Derain, Raoul Dufy and many others to the United States.

His fluency in French, German and Spanish allowed him to interpret cutting-edge ideas developing in Europe and translate them for an American audience. It also made it possible for him to communicate personally with foreign artists and negotiate on behalf of gallery owners and museum curators.

His intervention has been of vital importance in the encounter between established European and emerging American art.

Duchamp’s Arrival

The arrival of Marcel Duchamp in Manhattan was an important moment in New York’s unfolding passion for modern art. He had left Paris in 1915 for two reasons. As a pacifist he abhorred the war that was ripping Europe apart; and as a creative artist he had fallen out with members of the Section d’Or who rejected his latest aesthetic theories.

When he arrived in New York, Marcel soon discovered that he had become a “notorious” figure due to his Cubist-inspired painting “Nu descendant un escalier” (Nude descending a staircase, 1912) which had caused a scandal when exhibited at the Armory Show. The wilder the insults hurled at Duchamp, the more visitors came to see his work. He became Europe’s best-known modernist in the United States.

Pach introduced the twenty-eight year old newcomer in Manhattan to Walter and Louise Arensberg, the city’s principal patrons of modern art who hosted a daily salon for members of the international avant-garde in their apartment at 33 West 67th Street. Duchamp stayed a month at their household where he met everybody who was anybody in the art and literary world.

Whilst the artist himself preferred to work and live in relative anonymity, his patrons and their friends purchased enough work from him to pay for his living.

Duchamp became a major art advisor to the Arensbergs, helping them to build one of the most audacious art collections of their time. In 1950, with his help and advice in the negotiations, they donated their entire collection to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

In 1916, Pach founded the Society of Independent Artists in association with Duchamp, Walter Arensberg, Katherine Dreier and others which supported non-conforming artists who were rejected by traditional institutions. Membership entitled artists to participate in the society’s exhibitions which had “no jury” and “no prizes.”

It was agreed that works of art would be displayed in alphabetical name order rather than according to curatorial views or preferences. Walter Pach acted as Treasurer of the Society.

Fountain

The first challenge to the Society was preparing its debut Annual Exhibition which was planned for April-May 1917. Using a false name, Duchamp submitted his “Fountain” to the organizing committee, an industrially-produced urinal purchased from J.L. Mott Iron Works Company.

He signed the piece Richard Mutt and presented this “work of art” as a means of putting the democratic ethos of the new Society to the test.

Duchamp’s contribution was considered so offensive to the traditions of art that the Board of the Society refused to exhibit the work, arguing that it would demean other works on display. His urinal was excluded from the show.

The decision was controversial. The idea of having a jury-free exhibition of contemporary art was for many participants an exciting way of turning Manhattan into a dynamic cultural center.

Duchamp resigned in protest against the Board taking it upon itself to veto an artist’s contribution. Shortly after, he took the urinal to be photographed by Alfred Stieglitz. As the “fountain” was lost thereafter, this photograph became a key document in recording the work’s existence.

In André Breton & Paul Éluard’s Dictionnaire abrégé du Surréalisme Duchamp defined a “readymade” as a mass-produced object that was “elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist.”

He had developed the concept to shake up accepted norms of artistic creation. With “Fountain” the artist called into question the principles on which museums were based, such as the cultural value of particular objects and their protection as privileged artifacts as well as the nature of authenticity.

Many contemporary critics consider “Fountain” an icon of twentieth-century art. Prank and parody had been fundamental to the modernist experiment and central to the disruptive strategies of the avant-garde. Marcel’s urinal originates in a long (French) history of artists disrupting the status quo amongst the elite.

In spite of controversy, the Exhibition did go ahead and Walter Pach considered the event a success as it enhanced a wider appreciation of modern art. In subsequent years the Society stayed true to its original aim, providing an opportunity to exhibit for emerging artists (its final show took place in 1944).

In 1920 attention was paid to Indigenous contributions and in 1923 the focus was on Mexican art. Pach himself was an active supporter of indigenous arts throughout North America and Mexico (he was a close friend of Diego Rivera) and helped organize these exhibitions.

Pach continued his career as a teacher and writer. He published a study on Georges Seurat and was the first American art critic to lecture on Vincent van Gogh’s contribution to modernism. He also translated the journals of Eugène Delacroix.

Walter Pach was one of Manhattan’s outstanding cultural mediators.

Illustrations, from above: Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain,” 1917 (photograph by Alfred Stieglitz); Pach Brothers’ portrait of President Theodore Roosevelt (Library of Congress); Walter Pach’s “Self Portrait,” 1936 (Graphic Arts Collection, Princeton University); Joachim-Raphael Boronali (fictitious artist), Et le soleil s’endormit sur l’Adriatique (Sunset over the Adriatic), 1910 (private collection); the 69th Regiment Armory in 1913; A 1913 parody, “The Rude descending a staircase (Rush-Hour at the Subway),” in The New York Evening Sun; “The Arensberg living room,” ca. 1918 (photograph by Charles Sheeler); and the urinal hanging in Marcel Duchamp’s studio at 33 West 67th Street, 1917–1918. Two other “readymades” by Duchamp are visible in the photograph: In Advance of the Broken Arm (1915), and Hat rack (Porte-chapeau) (1917). This photograph is reproduced at the top right of one of the plates from Duchamp’s La Boîte-en-valise.