The rectified readymade

First, the fact the object is most often misremembered for: this is not Leonardo’s painting. Duchamp did not deface the Mona Lisa itself, which never left the Louvre. He defaced a cheap printed postcard reproduction of it, a mass-produced copy you could buy for pocket change. The thing he altered was already a commercial product, a piece of the throwaway world of shops and tourist racks. That matters as much as the moustache.

Duchamp had a precise term for what he made. A plain readymade, like the urinal, is a found object he chose and barely touched. This one he altered, so he called it a rectified readymade: a found, mass-produced object that the artist has marked or changed. The change here is tiny. A moustache and a goatee in pencil on the printed face, five lettered capitals in the margin below. That is the entire intervention. He took a manufactured image and added a few graphite strokes, and the choosing-plus-marking is the whole of the art. The skill is in the idea, not the drawing.

The moustache and goatee do something beyond vandalism: they turn the world’s icon of female beauty into a man, or at least into something androgynous. That was not idle. Around this same moment, and surfacing the very next year, Duchamp was inventing a female alter ego for himself, a persona named Rrose Sélavy, a name that, said aloud in French, sounds like “Eros, c’est la vie”(“Eros, that’s life”). He would have himself photographed in drag as her and would sign works in her name. So a man putting a male moustache on a famously female face, while building himself a female second self, is all one tangled game about gender and identity, played across the same few years.

Two different objects get muddled here. In March 1920, Duchamp’s friend Francis Picabia wanted to run the image in his Dada magazine, 391. He could not wait for Duchamp’s actual card to reach him, so, with Duchamp’s consent, Picabia drew the moustache himself, straight onto his own reproduction, and printed it. He forgot the goatee. So the famous 391 version is moustache only, and it is a separate thing from Duchamp’s 1919 card, which has both moustache and goatee. (Decades later, in 1942, Duchamp added the missing goatee by hand to a print and inscribed it, in French, “Moustache by Picabia, goatee by Marcel Duchamp, April 1942.”) Moustache andgoatee is the 1919 original; moustache alone is Picabia’s 1920 reproduction.

The picture is a 1919 picture; Picabia’s 391 printing is 1920.