A postcard, a pencil, and a pun

In 1919, in Paris, Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) bought a postcard. Not a special one: a cheap, mass-produced printed reproduction of the most famous painting on earth, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (in French, La Joconde), the sort of card you could buy by the rack near the Louvre for a few centimes. He took a pencil. On the printed face he drew a moustache and a small goatee, and underneath the image he lettered five capital letters: L.H.O.O.Q. Then he called the result his art, and he meant it.

To feel how much nerve that took, you have to know who Duchamp already was. By 1919 he was the man who, two years earlier in New York, had bought a factory-made urinal, laid it on its back, signed it “R. Mutt,” titled it Fountain, and submitted it to an exhibition as sculpture. That was the readymade: Duchamp’s idea that the artist’s choice, not the artist’s hand, is what makes a thing art. Pick an ordinary manufactured object, declare it art, and the declaring is the whole creative act. The urinal was a found object he barely touched. The Mona Lisa postcard would be something one notch stranger.

He had come back to Paris and into the orbit of the new Paris Dada circle. Dada was the anti-art movement born in neutral Zurich in 1916, in the middle of a world war chewing up a generation, by a handful of exiled poets and painters who decided that the civilization which had produced both the Mona Lisa and the machine gun no longer deserved to be taken seriously. Their answer was an art of nonsense, accident, and provocation. By 1919 Dada was crystallizing in Paris around figures like the poet Tristan Tzara, the writer André Breton, and Duchamp’s old friend the painter Francis Picabia. Defacing the supreme sacred object of European art with a graffiti moustache was, in that company, exactly the right kind of joke: light on the surface and a bomb underneath.

Duchamp did not pick the Mona Lisa at random. By 1919 the painting was the object of something close to religious devotion in French culture, a worship the period itself nicknamed Jocondisme (Mona-Lisa-ism). It had a built-in cult and a fresh scandal: in 1911 the picture had been stolen from the Louvre in a sensational theft that ran in newspapers across the world, and its 1913 recovery turned it into front-page celebrity. By the end of the war it was less a painting than a relic, the thing you made a pilgrimage to and revered.

Duchamp was not even the first to tweak her. Back in 1883, at a Paris show by a group of pranksters called the Incoherents, the artist Sapeck (Eugène Bataille) had printed a Mona Lisasmoking a pipe. Whether Duchamp knew that picture isn’t recorded. What he added was the thing that made it stick: a pun, and a claim that the defaced card was, itself, his art.

That made it the ideal target for a gesture the French called épater le bourgeois, “to shock the middle class.” Take the one image a respectable Parisian held most sacred, scribble a moustache on a cheap copy of it, attach a dirty pun, and call it art. The point was never that Leonardo was a bad painter. The point was the worship, the gilt-framed, hushed-museum reverence that the Dadaists thought was a fraud.