The Mustache That Broke a Religion
In 1919, a Frenchman took a cheap postcard of the world's most sacred painting and gave her a mustache and a dirty joke for a name. The bourgeoisie never quite recovered.
Marcel Duchamp did not paint L.H.O.O.Q. He found it — a cheap postcard reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa — and with a pencil he added a mustache and a goatee. Then he gave it a title that, read aloud in French, sounded like 'Elle a chaud au cul': she has a hot ass, a vulgar way of saying a woman is sexually restless. In a late interview Duchamp offered his own looser translation: 'there is fire down below.'
The piece belongs to what Duchamp called readymades — ordinary or found objects transformed into art simply by altering, renaming, or repositioning them, as he had done earlier with Fountain. L.H.O.O.Q. is specifically a 'rectified readymade,' since Duchamp physically drew on the found postcard rather than leaving it untouched.
Duchamp was not the first to mock the Mona Lisa. In 1887, Eugène Bataille, under the name Sapeck, had published Mona Lisa Smoking a Pipe in the magazine Le Rire. It is not known whether Duchamp knew of Bataille's earlier joke.
The work's journey to publication had its own twist. Francis Picabia wanted to print L.H.O.O.Q. in his magazine 391 but couldn't wait for the original to arrive from New York. With Duchamp's permission, Picabia drew the mustache himself — but forgot the goatee — and captioned it 'Tableau Dada par Marcel Duchamp.' Duchamp noticed the missing goatee, and two decades later, when Jean Arp found Picabia's version in a bookstore, Duchamp finally corrected it: he drew the goatee in black ink with a fountain pen and wrote, 'Moustache par Picabia / barbiche par Marcel Duchamp / avril 1942.'
Duchamp made several versions of the piece in different sizes and media. One, an unaltered black-and-white reproduction of the Mona Lisa mounted on card, was titled L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved — a joke that only works because viewers now expected the facial hair. The gender-bending of a masculinized Mona Lisa fit a theme Duchamp returned to elsewhere: he had adopted a female alter ego, Rrose Sélavy, a name that puns on 'Eros, c'est la vie' — Eros, that's life.
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