Pissing on the Pissoir

Studies in World Art, Book 132

By: Edward Lucie-Smith

Narrated by: Joe Van Riper

Length: 10 mins

Publisher's summary

Dr. Glyn Thompson’s digital book, Duchamp’s Urinal? The Facts Behind the Façade, at first tends to make the heart sink. "Do I really want," one tends to ask oneself, "to learn this much about the trade in porcelain sanitary wares, as it existed in the United States during the second decade of the 20th century?" Dr. Thompson has done his homework, and he is insistent that you should do it too. "No skipping over the chapter-and-verse, boy, in search of something a bit racier."

Some of the facts are, however, sufficiently racy in themselves. The urinal, or Fountain, as it is now officially called, turns out not to have been the work - or wheeze - of Duchamp himself, but that of a mad German baroness called Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Her biographical details are almost too good to be true. Her maiden name was Plötz (as in "I’m just going to plotz here and wait while you do the shopping."). She was born in Swinemünde (you can read that as "swine mouth") in Pomerania, and studied art in not-yet-infamous Dachau, near Munich. Baron Leopold von Freytag Loringhoven was her third husband, whom she married in New York in 1913, having emigrated in America in 1910.

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