DADA · WORK

L.H.O.O.Q.

Marcel Duchamp · 1919

A ten-centime Mona Lisa postcard, a pencil moustache, and a five-letter dirty pun, aimed not at Leonardo but at the worship of the masterpiece.

The canvas

Tap to zoom

Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q., 1919. Rectified readymade (pencil on a printed postcard reproduction of the Mona Lisa). 7¾ in × 4⅞ in.
The 1919 original is privately held, its current location not publicly fixed; museums hold authorized later replicas and editions (Centre Pompidou, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and others).. No museum holds the 1919 original. The work survives publicly through Duchamp’s own later replicas, the Boîte-en-valise reproductions, and the 1965 L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved edition.

Look closer

Find these on the canvas above

The pencil moustache
Across the upper lip of the printed face, center of the card
Two short pencil strokes sit on top of the smooth printed lip. The graffiti is deliberately crude against the soft mechanical image beneath it. This is the first and most famous of the two added marks, and on the 391 version reproduced by Picabia it is the only one.
The goatee
At the chin of the figure, just below the famous half-smile
A small pointed pencil beard finishes the masculinizing of the face. Moustache plus goatee is the combination that defines the true 1919 original. A version with the moustache but no goatee is the 391 reproduction, where Picabia forgot the beard, not the card Duchamp drew.
The Mona Lisa, untouched beneath
The whole card under the two pencil marks
The half-smile, the folded hands, the hazy receding landscape of Leonardo’s portrait are all reproduced unaltered. Duchamp changed almost nothing. The entire work is the moustache, the beard, and the lettering; everything else is Leonardo, printed by a postcard press.
The lettering below
In the margin under the image
Five capital letters, L.H.O.O.Q., pencilled in the lower margin and separated by periods. The whole obscene joke lives in how those letters sound when you read them aloud in French. On the card itself they are just five quiet capitals.
The cheap postcard print
The surface and scale of the object as a whole
This is not a painting. It is a small commercial postcard reproduction, flat printed ink at roughly 7¾ by 4⅞ inches, the mechanical look of mass reproduction. The cheapness is part of the point: the most famous defacement in modern art is a thing you could hold in one hand and post for a few centimes.
The collision of registers
The card as one whole gesture
A sublime Renaissance icon, a schoolyard doodle, and an obscene wordplay all share one tiny card. The humor and the attack are inseparable; you cannot take the gag without taking the argument it carries about what a masterpiece is worth.

The story · 5 chapters

~18 min total

Paris · 1919

A postcard, a pencil, and a pun

Duchamp, back from New York and circling the new Paris Dada crowd, buys a cheap printed Mona Lisa postcard, draws a moustache and goatee on it in pencil, and letters five capitals underneath. He calls the result, with a straight face, his art.

The making

The rectified readymade

How the object was actually made: a mass-produced reproduction altered with a few pencil strokes, Duchamp’s own term for it, and the gender play that ties it to his alter ego Rrose Sélavy. NOT Leonardo’s panel; a postcard. And the moustache-only version Picabia drew himself.

The key statement

Elle a chaud au cul

The whole obscenity hides in how you read the five letters aloud in French. The literal vulgar sense, Duchamp’s own softened gloss, and the sourced interview line about what the moustache does to the face, with the “not” that careless quoters drop.

The break

Defacing the most revered painting on earth

Why this is a rupture and not a prank: the gesture of altering a sacred image becomes the artwork, the readymade is turned on an existing canonical work, and authorship is claimed over someone else’s finished image. The seed of appropriation art.

After

Versions, a shave, and where the original isn’t

The 1919 card vanishes into private hands while Duchamp keeps remaking it: the 391 reproduction, the Boîte-en-valise miniatures, and the 1965 Shaved version with the moustache gone. Museums hold the copies; the original’s public location is uncertain.

1919

Made

7¾″ × 4⅞″

Dimensions

Five letters

The whole joke

Provenance

Every hand it passed through

1919

Marcel Duchamp (the artist)

Paris

Made in 1919: a pencil moustache and goatee, plus the lettered title, added to a cheap printed postcard reproduction of the Mona Lisa. A rectified readymade.

1920

Reproduced by Francis Picabia in 391 (issue 12)

Paris

Picabia ran the image in his Dada magazine 391 in March 1920. He could not wait for Duchamp’s card to arrive, so, with Duchamp’s consent, he drew the moustache himself and forgot the goatee. That 391 image is therefore a separate, moustache-only object, not the 1919 original. Duchamp added the missing goatee by hand to a print in 1942 and inscribed the correction.

20th century

Private hands (associated with the Mary Sisler collection)

Location not publicly fixed

The 1919 original passed through private collections and is generally described as privately held; no museum holding of the 1919 card is documented in the sources. The safe statement is that the original is in a private collection and its current public location is uncertain.

1930s–1965

Duchamp’s own later versions and editionsMuseum

Paris / New York

Duchamp remade the work over the years in differing sizes and media; one version is held at the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris. Miniature reproductions appear in his Boîte-en-valise portable-museum boxes (examples at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and elsewhere). In 1965 he issued L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved, a plain unaltered Mona Lisa reproduction whose joke is that the moustache has been removed.