Transcription
The interpretation offered by Marcel Duchamp around the motif of the portrait is part of the Dadaist polemic against the aesthetic and material principles of Western painting. A fierce supporter of the gratuitousness of art and the vanity of its products and practices, Duchamp undertakes a systematic work of critical review of the very idea of artistry.
If the invention of the ready-made allows the artist to elevate any object drawn from everyday reality into a work of art, even the most humble and vulgar, the revisiting of the great masterpieces of painting offers the opportunity to question the itself of the painter as the sole creator of the work. An exemplary victim of this practice is the most famous painting of all time and a portrait: Leonardo's Mona Lisa.
The addition of a beard and mustache to a reproduction of the Mona Lisa by Duchamp indicates the numerous points in common between the two artists, both from a cultural point of view (for example, the passion of both for anagrams and puns) and aesthetic. For both Leonardo and Duchamp, art must be more mental than physical. We have before us not a simple provocation, but also an allusion to the fact that it is not clear whether the Mona Lisa looks more like a man or a woman.
Duchamp's reinterpretation goes even further. It re-proposes the theme of the androgynous model and the use of letters to hide a teaching from the layman, as the art historian Arturo Schwarz indicates. The deciphering of the letters, indicated by the artist himself, offers us the key to interpreting the work, which in alchemical terms could mean the union of what is above (man-fire-earth) with what is below (woman-water-moon), that is to say the fusion between the Sun (Sun-Bachelor) and the Moon (Moon-Bride).
Under the reproduction of the Mona Lisa, in fact, the artist has marked LHOOQ. Letters in French, one after the other, the five letters give "Elle a chaud au cul," "You have hot butt." Evidently a further hoax, although it cannot be excluded that the phrase hides some hermetic meaning under the joking tone, referring to the philosopher's fire that nourishes matter.
But this artist will do much more. By denying the principle of the uniqueness of the work, Duchamp leads the artists of the next generation on the path of serial repetition. Revolutionary!