Readymades of Marcel Duchamp to turn up any identical matches to photographs of the originals. However, there are accounts of Walter Arensberg and Joseph Stella being with Duchamp when he purchased the original "Fountain" at J. L. Mott Iron Works. Such investigations are hampered by the fact that few of the original "readymades" survive, having been lost or destroyed. Those that still exist are predominantly reproductions authorized or designed by Duchamp in the final two decades of his life. Shearer also asserts that the artwork "L.H.O.O.Q." which is recorded to be a poster-copy of the "Mona Lisa" with a moustache drawn on it, is
Marcel Duchamp included his first "machine" painting, "Coffee Mill (Moulin à café)" (1911), which he gave to his brother Raymond Duchamp-Villon. The later more figurative machine painting of 1914, "Chocolate Grinder" ("Broyeuse de chocolat"), prefigures the mechanism incorporated into the "Large Glass" on which he began work in New York the following year. Duchamp's first work to provoke significant controversy was "Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2" "(Nu descendant un escalier n° 2)" (1912). The painting depicts the mechanistic motion of a nude, with superimposed facets, similar to motion pictures. It shows elements of both the fragmentation and synthesis of the Cubists,