baroness elsa von freytag-loringhoven

The urinal was Elsa’s declaration of war against a man’s war—an extraordinary visual assault on all that men stood for.
If Duchamp did not submit the urinal, why would he pretend later that he did? After Elsa died in 1927, forgotten and in abject poverty, Duchamp began to let his name be associated with the urinal, and by 1950, four years after the death of Alfred Stieglitz, who photographed the original Fountain, he began to assume its authorship.