Since 1913, Duchamp had been experimenting with notions of originality, challenging the art world to accept as legitimate what he called ‘readymades’, or everyday commercial objects that he deemed, by situating them in a new cultural context, to be works of art. In the case of Fountain, Duchamp purchased from the JL Mott Iron Works Company in New York a new urinal which he endeavoured to estrange from its accepted identity, just as earlier he had forced observers of his painting Nude Descending a Staircase No 2 (1912), to recalibrate the way they perceive the muscular syncopations of the female form as it flexes through space.

The assumed name he attached to the object - ‘R Mutt’ - was intended, he later confessed, to being a fusion of the manufacturer’s name for the ceramic apparatus and a ‘funny’ character from the famous cartoon strip Mutt and Jeff. Writing at the time of Fountain’s rejection from The Society of Independent Artists’ exhibition, an anonymous contributor to the Dada periodical Blind Man defended the sculpture, which had come under sustained attack, in terms that would help propel the work and the dilemmas it posed permanently into popular imagination:

"Mr Mutt’s fountain is not immoral, that is absurd, no more than a bathtub is immoral. It is a fixture that you see every day in plumbers’ shop windows.

"Whether Mr Mutt with his own hands made the fountain has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for that object."

With a flick of his wrist, Duchamp had flushed traditional notions of artistic identity down the drain. The implications for how an artist perceived his or her role in making objects would be irreversible and far-reaching.