In 1917, a urinal was sent to an art exhibition in New York, supposedly by Duchamp. But recent research has shown that the urinal was actually submitted by Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Her gesture was an early feminist attack on a male society. She didn’t claim the urinal was a work of art. She was taking the piss. Duchamp stole her idea much later when he began to promote himself as the founding father of modern art.
flommus:yama-bato: Sparrow, Walter Shaw - Women painters of the world, from the time of Caterina Vigri, 1413-1463, to Rosa Bonheur and the present day. 1905. (on archive.org)
[…] any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at. For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty.
Pezold, Frederike: Die neue leibhaftige Zeichensprache (via Medien Kunst Netz)
probleme eines abstrakt-figurativen expressionismus,* Nr. 31: Malerisches
