Upon his return to Paris in the summer of 1919, Marcel Duchamp purchased a reproduction of the Mona Lisa, the most beloved of the Louvre paintings and the ultimate emblem of sanctified, museum art. He then defaced the sitter’s famous, enigmatic smile with a hastily-drawn moustache and beard and added five letters underneath the image: L.H.O.O.Q. When spoken aloud in French, the letters spell out the sentence "Elle a chaud au cul" (She has a hot ass).
The artist’s embellishments of the original image also prompt considerations of sexual ambiguity, metamorphosis and identity—themes that were central to Duchamp’s practice. By transforming the Mona Lisa into a man, Duchamp created a hybrid, androgynous ideal, a character not unlike his feminine alter ego, Rrose Sélavy (indeed another source of evocative word play: ‘Eros c'est la vie’, or ‘Eros is life’).
Duchamp's iconic work features in the Prints & Multiples auction at Sotheby’s London taking place 18-25 September.
