Man attacks urinal artwork with a hammer

A FRENCH man was taken into custody at a Paris art museum yesterday after attacking Marcel Duchamp’s famous porcelain urinal with a hammer.

Duchamp's 1917 piece Fountain an ordinary white, porcelain urinal was slightly chipped in the attack at the Pompidou Centre.

It was removed from the exhibit for repair.

The man, whose identity was not released, vandalised the same artwork in 1993 urinating into the piece when it was on display in Nimes, in southern France, police said.

During questioning, he claimed his hammer attack was a work of performance art that might have pleased the artists of Dada, the early 20th-century avant-garde movement that was the focus of the Pompidou Centre exhibit, police said.

A 2004 poll of 500 arts figures ranked Fountain as the most influential work of modern art ahead of Andy Warhol's screen prints of Marilyn Monroe and Pablo Picasso's Guernica.