I wasn’t quite sure what to expect of our exhibition, Dalí Duchamp, which opens to the public on Saturday. They were unlikely friends: Salvador Dalí, the great mustachioed Catalan showman; and Marcel Duchamp, the conceptual ironist. But there is a photograph of them chatting together in New York and they were friends, Duchamp renting a holiday apartment in Cadaqués during the 1950s. And their art fits together interestingly: both relentlessly experimental, dressing up, using new materials, enjoying the erotic and exploiting surrealism. Duchamp exhibited a urinal (‘The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges’). Dalí stuck a lobster on a telephone. I also hadn’t realised that when I visited the Dalí Museum in Figueres in the early 1980s, he was still alive.
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
Good you merely say that Duchamp ‘exhibited the urinal’ since Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven rather than Duchamp seems to have been responsible for this century-old yet still (alas) oh so influential ‘work of art’; see Glyn Thompson, ‘Saccharine Centenary: The hundred-year old lie’, The Jackdaw, 132 (March-April 2017): 22-5.
The thing about Duchamp as opposed to so many present-day conceptual artists (whether or not he pinched it from Freytag-Lohringhoven) is that he then didn’t keep repeating it over and over for years, but having made his point quickly moved on to something else. and personally I’ve always admired Dalí for his mastery of his craft if for nothing else. From his “10 Rules for Him who would Be a Painter:” “Begin by learning to draw and paint like the old masters. After that, everyone will respect you and you can do as you like.” That, and we share the same birthday, 11 May.
Dear Edward, In qualifying the observation that you highlight – that Duchamp had in 1917 exhibited a urinal – with the latter”s semi-contemporaneous reference to plumbing and bridges, Mr Smith perpetuates the myth that Mutt’s urinal had been submitted by Duchamp and exhibited at the Independents’ inaugural exhibition, neither of which claims are, as you know, true. Mr Smith’s assumption is only accurate in respect of the so-called ‘replica’ urinals (none of which qualify as such in respect of Mutt’s lost original, thereby destroying the putative endorsement they drew fallaciously from it) that Duchamp began exhibiting from 1950. But – as you also know – such is the way with orthodox Duchamp commentary.