Marcel Duchamp
‚L.H.O.O.Q‘

Key Pieces series

On the occasion of contemporary artist Marcel Duchamp’s birthday, our Key Piece of the week is his L.H.O.O.Q.

1. L.H.O.O.Q is a ready made artwork created by French Dada artist Marcel Duchamp in 1919.
2. L.H.O.O.Q is a retake of the 16th century Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci to which Duchamp added a beard and a mustache.
3. Duchamp decided to drew upon Mona Lisa because of its fame and supreme art status among the bourgeois French class.
4. The name of the piece is a French pun as the letters pronounced in French sounds like ‘Elle a chaud au cul’ which means ‘She is hot in the arse.’
5. As most of his ready-made, Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q was produced different times through different medium and sizes.
6. One version of L.H.O.O.Q is at the centre Pompidou, one belongs to the collection of Antoni Tàpies, one to the collection of Dorothea Tanning, one to the collection of Arturo Schwarz, two to private collections and one was stolen in 1981 and never recovered.
7. The masculinized female introduces the theme of gender reversal, a popular theme within Duchamp’s corpus.
8. Duchamp’s Mona Lisa is a Freudian joke given that the psychoanalyst argued that Leonardo da Vinci was homosexual.
9. Many parodies of L.H.O.O.Q. have been created including the ones of Salvador Dalì, Fernand Léger and René Magritte.
10. The arrival of the computer and Internet made arrive many computerized versions of L.H.O.O.Q.

Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q, 1919.


Fernand Léger, La Joconde aux clés, 1960.