Mona Lisa Travels. III. Mona Lisa in the Art of the 20th Century

Four hundred years after Leonardo da Vinci painted her, Mona Lisa made a triumphant entrance into modern art. The public celebrated her more than ever before as the queen of all portraits and as a symbol of femininity, and the secret of her smile and her inscrutable gaze gave rise to the most contradictory interpretations. All of this seemed unbearable to the young artists who were just setting out to turn the established order of academic art on its head and to replace it by the revolutionary values of the modern project based on absolute creative freedom. They would reinvent the world of art.

While Mona Lisa was taking these hits, her creator, Leonardo, was paradoxically the focus of increased interest, acclaimed as a forerunner of the modern era. More than 50 books were devoted to him between 1864 and 1919. These were written by art historians, constituting a new discipline, but also by poets and romantics such as the Russian Dmitry Merezhkovsky, and notably by the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, who published Leonardo da Vinci — A Memory of His Childhood in 1910, sparking controversies that are still echoed today. On the occasion of the 400th anniversary of Leonardo’s death, in 1919, and the publication of his complete notebooks, he was rediscovered not only as a painter, but also as a universal scholar, inventor and constructor of machines, such as the one that would allow man to fly, an age-old dream that was finally realized in 1903 by the Wright brothers.

Even though Malevich was the first to understand this phenomenon, integrating it into his work starting in 1914, Duchamp deserves the credit for executing the key iconoclastic act, one which would attract others in its wake: at first the Dadaists and the Surrealists, then the proponents of Pop Art in the United States and finally the European avant-garde starting in the 1960s. This iconoclastic rampage of course experienced a few caesuras, and our postmodern epoch no longer feels a need to confront this myth quite so vehemently. We instead see it as an important symbol that can be integrated into our culture, giving it — as Pusenkoff does — a contemporary spin in step with the nascent 21st century.

We want to take a look here at how prominent artists in the course of the 20th century integrated the Mona Lisa into their works. We will examine the circumstances that caused them to occupy themselves with this picture and explore the impact of their work on other artists as well as in general on our perception of this emblematic figure which, although created in the early 16th century, takes up such an important and even crucial place in the art of the 20th century. Does this then exhaust the subject? I don’t know why it should. After all, myths are often long-lived and only lose their vitality once the societies that created them have vanished. They then become part of history and wait, dormant, for someone to come and revive them. At 500, Mona Lisa today seems younger than ever. Is it this eternal youth that fascinates us so?

The work’s title, Solar Eclipse, refers to the opera Victory over the Sun, on which he was working in 1913 with Welimir Chlebnikov and Alexej Krucenych. The story is about triumphing over a rationality that remains tied to the values of the past, a victory against «objective» representation of the visible world and also a victory against the shining suns of art such as the Mona Lisa. The partial eclipse helps us to resist being blinded by the past, to finally gain the freedom to envision a new universe.

In a picture series executed that year — which included the composition with the Mona Lisa — he then presented the principle of papier collé, with objects integrated into the picture. This is a method that Braque and Picasso had developed in late 1912 and which was regarded as the second Cubist revolution, the traces of which can still be felt in contemporary art. But Malevich already looks beyond this; he prepares the next step, the pictorial revolution he will dub Suprematism. The picture still manifests some Cubist elements, but is already reaching toward a smooth surface. The white rectangle at its center and the black rectangle behind it dominate the composition. Next to the white rectangle is a picture of the Mona Lisa cut out of a newspaper, crossed out twice in red and hence in a certain sense invalidated. Below her is another newspaper clipping with the text: «Apartment for rent.»

The public would catch its first glimpse of this new symbol in autumn 1915, at the 0.10 exhibition in Petrograd. «Eclipsing» the Mona Lisa was a necessity for Malevich, while also showing — as we can discern from the texts he wrote on the subject — the great significance he attributed to her.

Duchamp was in fact extremely interested in this outstanding personality and felt akin to him in more ways than one. Duchamp knew Freud’s book and his ponderings on the problems of Leonardo’s sexual identity, but he also shared Leonardo’s interest in the natural sciences, even if for him it was more a matter of artistic speculation than pure research. Is it a coincidence that both great men stopped painting at a certain point, the one going on to pursue studies on the subject of flight and the other devoting himself to the game of chess?

That the very symbol of femininity should be given male traits, with Duchamp later announcing that «she is a man», shows how interested he was in this identity problem. This is also demonstrated by the fact that he later took a female pseudonym — Rose Sélavy — signing it to several of his works starting in 1920. He also asked his friend Man Ray to make a photograph of him as a woman, and thus took on a female identity as an artist. The painter Picabia, who alludes in several of his works to L.H.O.O.Q., decided to illustrate Duchamp’s piece in a magazine he edited. Since he didn’t have access to the original, he «reproduced» it, drawing on the mustache but forgetting the goatee, which Marcel Duchamp added later, in 1942.

It is no accident that, the same year, Duchamp «lent» Enrico Baj his face for the collage La vengeance de la Joconde — Hommage à Marcel Duchamp (The Revenge of the Mona Lisa — Homage to Marcel Duchamp), in which the Mona Lisa is surrounded by medals which ironically stand for the honors with which she has been heaped. Finally, she can openly display her maleness and take revenge on all those who loved her for the wrong reasons. A photo of Marcel Duchamp with Baj and his work illustrates the climate of mutual understanding in which it was created — on the occasion of a «Celebration of the Gioconda» that took place in Paris in 1965 under Duchamp’s patronage.