Mona & Marcel

1503–1968

• Choose a date.
• Choose an entry time.
• Purchase your ticket.
• Arrive at the museum at your scheduled time.
• Follow the signs to Room 711 in the Salle des États.

You are one of the roughly 25–30,000 people who come to the Louvre every day to see her, so you’ll only have about 3 or 4 minutes in the room and only about 50 seconds to work your way to the front to get as close as possible (about 15 feet away),

Crowds of tourists in the Salle des États (fair use)

but even then, since the painting is only 21 inches wide, and the varnish has begun to crack and yellow, it’s almost impossible to make out the famous sfumato — the subtle smoky blending of tones — that makes her face and her smile so mysterious. Even more invisible is the guarnello, the thin gossamer-like veil that covers her, traditionally worn by a woman during pregnancy or just after giving birth, to certify her marital status.

It wasn’t the way Leonardo intended her to be seen when he began painting her around 1503. Back then, Lisa was the wife of a wealthy Florentine silk merchant — Francesco del Giocondo — Mona being the shortened version of ma donna, the Italian equivalent of Madam. So it’s a portrait commission, never meant to be viewed in public, or at a distance, but up close and in private, and only by her owner, her husband.

But after Leonardo’s death in 1518, King Francis I of France bought it (along with several others) and hung it in his palace. And Napoleon Bonaparte briefly had it in his bedroom. And since 1797, it’s been hanging in a room in the Louvre.

Though it’s not at all clear just where. Or whether it was moved around from one room or another. It was just part of the royal collection. And not viewed as anything that stood out from all the rest as the archetypal Renaissance portrait that tourists from all over the world now crane their necks just to catch a brief glimpse.

You’d think the change was all very gradual. But it wasn’t. It happened overnight, literally. The night of Sunday, August 21, 1911.

When Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian glazier who worked at the Louvre, removed the wooden panel from its frame. Where it hung on a wall in the Salon Carré, among about 50 works by other Renaissance masters, all arranged salon-style, with paintings stacked together in multiple rows from floor to ceiling, not spaced out as they are today.

So when the museum opened on Monday, no one even noticed! It wasn’t until later in the day, when a painter arrived at the Salon Carré to make copies of the gallery and found an empty space…

Here’s the biggest one of them all, the Paris Salon, as Charles X is handing out the annual awards, in 1824.

An 1827 painting by François Joseph Heim, now in the Louvre. (Wikipedia Commons)

Why was art hung this way back then?

It was partly to save space, as art collectors gradually replaced patrons and soon began to acquire too many “works of art” to comfortably display in their own salons. But it was also a matter of prestige, to show off how wealthy you were, that you could afford a bigger collection than the guy in the mansion across the street.

Perhaps most of all, it gradually became a way of “looking” at art in much the same way as you shopped for anything else. It allowed you (and your envious visitors) to compare one painting with all the others next to it, so you could form a judgment as to which was the best, according to the accepted standards of the day. The idea that a painting might express some personal vision of the painter, and be shown all by itself on a wall, simply did not exist.

So when Vincenzo Peruggia picked out the Mona Lisa from all the others, he was the first one to do so. (Though to be fair, it was at eye-level and not at the bottom of the pack.) It was the judgment call of a thief that made all the difference. Her portrait was the most valuable of all.

(Never mind the other story — that Peruggia had fallen in love with a French hotel maid who resembled the woman in the painting and stole it to impress her, but after he was finally caught in Florence a year and a half later, he claimed his real motive was patriotic, to return the painting to his native country.)

No matter what the truth was, the theft became a media sensation. And things have never been the same. It’s now probably the most famous work of art in the world, and certainly the most viewed.

And the most parodied.

(Wikipedia Commons)

But this one isn’t the first — as soon as it was stolen in 1911, missing persons posters appeared all over Paris as a joke. (And even as far back as 1887, when a satirical magazine published a cartoon of her smoking a pipe.)

But this one, created by Marcel Duchamp in 1919, is certainly the most famous.

And for good reasons. Not the least of which is the dirty joke in the title, a gramogram — L H O O Q — the letters in French spelling out Elle a chaud au cul — “She has [a] hot ass” (or arse, if you are on the other side of the pond).

Intended as an insult to scandalize the new bourgeois viewing public. But perhaps more importantly, it turns the commodification of art on its head, since it was a mass-produced reproduction, transformed into a unique artwork by scrawling his own name at the bottom. (As he had done 2 years earlier with “Fountain” — when he purchased a porcelain urinal at a local hardware store, turning it on its side and signing it “R. Mudd.”)

It’s also an in-joke: when the artist Francis Picabia was planning to publish it in his magazine 391 (in March, 1920), he couldn’t wait for Duchamp to send him the “original”postcard — so he bought one of his own and drew in the moustache, but forgot the goatee. When Duchamp came across the “replica” in a bookstore in New York more than two decades later, he promptly added the goatee, but was careful to credit Picabia for the moustache in the new version. (There are any number of other versions, and no way to tell how many copies are “genuine”— all that can be said is that the original, like a number of Leonardo’s paintings, has never been found.)

And one last joke: the final version, made by Duchamp in 1965, coming full circle, back to where he began:

L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved

p.s. But it wasn’t just a joke.

As Duchamp later noted,

“The curious thing about that mustache and goatee is that when you look at it the Mona Lisa 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.”

Adding the facial hair didn’t just deface an icon; it completely shifted the subject’s gender identity. (Not such a crazy idea after all, given Leonardo’s own gender identity.)

Duchamp took the idea to its logical conclusion: here he is, posing in full drag as Rrose Sélavy, his female alter-ego, and yet another gramogram: Eros, c’est la vie.

photo by Man Ray, 1920 or 1921 (public domain)

And finally, there is Duchamp’s most spectacular work, one of the most private in the history of art. So private that it can’t even be shown by itself on a wall. But only through a wall, viewed through the holes in a rustic door, installed in the Philadelphia Museum of Art after his death in 1968, at the age of 81.

He’d been at it in secret for more than two decades. By day, he could be seen in Washington Square Park, in the West Village, sitting at the tables, playing speed chess, pretending to have given up on art.

But at night, in his studio on 14th Street, he was hard at work on a diorama. A museum exhibition. One that can be seen only if you go to the museum. And take a look inside.

It’s called Étant donnés. “Being given,” as in some mathematical theorem: 1) La chute d’eau (The Waterfall); 2) Le gaz d’éclairage (The Illuminating Gas).

And perhaps 3)… Eros, c’est la vie.

Here’s the door:

Étant donnés

If you want to enter, click on the link in the caption above. (And once inside, you can use your cursor to take an even closer look.)

I won’t tell anyone you peeked. It’s private, just between him and you.

Unless, of course, you’d like to leave a response.

p.p.s. If you clicked on the link and looked behind the door, and were repulsed by what you saw, you aren’t alone.

As it features a naked woman’s body, exposed in the most intimate way imaginable — lying with her legs open and vulnerable, her face hidden.

She could have been the victim of a rape. That’s certainly a possible way to look at the scene.

But there are other ways to see it, especially if you know who the woman is.

At least, if you know whose body DuChamp modeled her on — Maria Martins, a pioneering Brazilian sculptor, with whom Duchamp carried on a torrid love affair for 5 years, beginning in 1946 when he was already 59! (She was 52.)

That’s her body lying there, based on a number of plaster casts DuChamp made while they were still together. She spent a lot of time in his studio in NYC, helping him to assemble the work.

After the affair ended, he married his second wife in 1954 — Alexina (“Teeny” — an artist and art dealer, previously married to Pierre Matisse — son of Henri). She was 20 years his junior. And it’s her left arm that is holding the gas lamp. And she was was there with him in the studio every day, helping him finish the piece.

Here they are playing chess. They remained married until his death in 1968. It’s she who had the work taken apart (just like the Statue of Liberty) and reassembled in Philadelphia for every one to see.

So if you know the background of the making of the work (as detailed in the museum catalog that accompanied the DuChamp exhibit back in 2008), it’s hard to view it as a rape scene.

But maybe you disagree. Or perhaps you have an entirely different take. As DuChamp often stated, the “creative act of the beholder” is just as important as that of the artist. You can’t have one without the other.

To me, it’s all about Eros and Life. And Art. She is holding up her lamp and inviting us to look. And though I can’t see her face, I imagine that she is smiling. Just like the Mona Lisa.