Defacing the most revered painting on earth

Before Duchamp drew on it, here is what a masterpiece was. It was something you copied, revered, framed in gilt, and made pilgrimages to. The artwork was the one irreproducible original object, touched by the hand of a genius; the artist’s job was to make beautiful, skilled, original things; and reproductions were lesser shadows of the real thing. The Mona Lisa was the supreme example of that whole order, the most sacred original of them all. To improve yourself, you studied it. To honor it, you kept your hands off.

Then Duchamp takes a ten-centime postcard of that sacred original, draws a graffiti moustache on it with a dirty pun underneath, and calls the result his art. Three ruptures land in one small gesture, and they are worth separating.

First, defacement becomes a creative act. The work is not a thing Duchamp made; it is a thing he marked. The gesture of altering, even of desecrating, a revered image is itself the artwork. Iconoclasm, the smashing of sacred images, becomes a medium you can work in. The damage is the painting.

Second, the readymade is turned on art itself. Duchamp had already declared a bottle rack and a urinal to be art by the act of choosing them. Here he aims that same move at an existing canonical artwork. Choosing a finished masterpiece and altering it collapses the line between making art and selecting it, between the original and the copy. The most revered object in the system is treated as just one more found object to pick up off the rack.

Third, appropriation. Duchamp takes someone else’s already-finished, world-famous image, recontextualizes it, and signs the result as his own work. He authors a picture he did not draw. Mona-Lisa-baiting itself was older than Duchamp; the Incoherents had done a pipe-smoking version back in the 1880s. What was new was the claim: that the altered card, signed and titled, was a finished artwork, not a cartoon. That is the move, and it had a long future. L.H.O.O.Q. is widely cited as an early seed of appropriation art, the practice of making new art out of existing images: Pop’s reuse of soup cans and comic strips, and later artists like Sherrie Levine and Elaine Sturtevant who re-photographed and remade other people’s pictures outright. L.H.O.O.Q. is one of the first proofs that the source image can be the medium.

The break is not an attack on Leonardo, whose skill no Dadaist doubted. It is an attack on masterpiece-worship: the museum hush, the gilt frame, the bourgeois reverence that treats a painting as a relic. Duchamp did not think the Mona Lisa was bad. He thought the way people knelt to it was ridiculous, and he found the cheapest, funniest, most precise way to say so.