Pierre Pinoncelli (15 April 1929 – 9 October 2021) was a French performance artist, best known for damaging two of the eight copies of Fountain by Marcel Duchamp with a hammer, as a statement that the work had lost its provocative value. The most recent attack happened on 4 January 2006 at Centre Pompidou in Paris and the first at an exhibition in Nîmes on 25 August 1993, where he also urinated into it before using the hammer.[1]
Pinoncelli was born in Saint-Étienne, Loire, France, in April 1929.
He also threw a bottle of red ink over André Malraux, the French minister of culture at the time; robbed a bank in Nice of 10 francs using a sawn-off shotgun; and cut the tip off one of his own fingers at an art exhibition in Colombia, V Festival de Performance de Cali, in protest at FARC guerillas holding the French-Colombian politician Íngrid Betancourt hostage.[2]
Pinoncelli died on 9 October 2021, at the age of 92.[3]