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

The afterlife of L.H.O.O.Q. is genuinely confusing, and it goes to the heart of what a readymade even is. There is no single, stable original sitting safely in one museum. There is, instead, a small crowd of versions, and telling them apart is half the story.

Start with what we already met. The 1919 original is the small pencil-on-postcard card with both moustache and goatee. The version printed in Picabia’s 391 in 1920 is a separate object, moustache only. Then Duchamp kept going. Over the following decades he made several further versions in differing sizes and media; one of these is held at the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, in Paris. In the 1930s and 1940s he also folded miniature reproductions of the work into his Boîte-en-valise, the “box in a valise,” a portable museum of tiny copies of his own art that he issued in editions; examples are at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and elsewhere.

The strangest sequel is the one with no moustache at all. In 1965 Duchamp issued L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved (in French, L.H.O.O.Q. rasée): a plain, completely unaltered black-and-white Mona Lisa reproduction, mounted on card and put out as an invitation and an edition. The joke is that the moustache has been “shaved off.” It is a separate, later work, and it has no pencil marks on it whatsoever. The bare 1965 Shaved is not the mustachioed 1919 card. After half a century, Duchamp made a sequel to a graffiti gag whose entire content is the absence of the graffiti, which is about as Duchamp a thing as exists.

So where is the 1919 original now? It is not pinned down. It passed through private hands (it is usually associated with the Mary Sisler collection) and is generally described as privately held, its current public location uncertain. The crucial thing to say plainly is that the museum pieces are not the 1919 original. The works at the Centre Pompidou, Philadelphia, and others are Duchamp’s own later replicas, the Boîte-en-valise reproductions, or the 1965 Shaved edition. No museum holds the little 1919 card itself.

Which is, in the end, the perfect ending for this particular object. Duchamp’s whole life’s argument was that the artist’s choice, not the precious unique original, is what makes art. A work that survives mainly as a swarm of copies, editions, and remakes, with the “real” one lost somewhere in private hands, is a work that practices what it preached. The moustache on the postcard mocked the cult of the irreplaceable masterpiece. It is fitting that it never quite became one.