Elle a chaud au cul

The title is the joke, and the joke is in your mouth, not on the card. L.H.O.O.Q. is a gramogram, a “word” spelled out by the sound of its letters rather than by what they spell on the page. Read the five letters aloud in French, one at a time, and the sounds run together into a sentence: “Elle a chaud au cul.” Nothing about the card tells you this. You have to pronounce the capitals in French to hear the obscenity hiding inside them, which is exactly why it can sit, innocent-looking, in a museum margin.

The meaning comes in two registers, and both are true. The literal sense is vulgar: cul is coarse French for the backside, the arse, so the line reads, bluntly, “She has a hot ass,” or “She is hot in the arse,” a crude way of saying the woman is sexually aroused, restless, randy. That is the obscenity the schoolboy hears. Duchamp himself, late in life and in English, offered a deliberately softer gloss: he rendered the line as “there is fire down below.” That is Duchamp being polite. His “fire down below” is a tidy translation of the same idea, not a literal rendering of cul; the actual word is rude. The vulgar literal sense and Duchamp’s own genteel paraphrase are two registers of one line, not two competing facts.

Asked years later about the moustache, Duchamp described what it did to the face:

“The curious thing about that moustache and goatee is that when you look at the Mona Lisait becomes a man. It is not a woman disguised as a man; it is a real man, and that was my discovery, without realizing it at the time.”

He said it in a radio interview with the critic Herbert Crehan, broadcast by WBAI, New York, in 1961 and published in the journal Evidence. The word “not” is load-bearing. A widely circulated version drops it and has Duchamp say the figure is“a woman disguised as a man,” which reverses his whole point. His point is the opposite: the figure does not merely look like a woman pretending; the moustache turns her into a genuine man. The pencil does not put on a costume; it changes the sex of the face.

And neither register of the joke insults Leonardo. The pun is about the woman in the picture; the gender line is about what two pencil marks can do. The thing being mocked is the reverence, the idea that this image is too holy to touch. Duchamp touches it, makes it dirty, makes it male, and dares you to be scandalized, which was always the test.