rasée L.H.O.O.Q.

Author: Bert Jansen

The retrospective staged in the Pasadena Art Museum in 1963 showed how Marcel Duchamp’s star had risen in his old age, chiefly through the work of the new generation of Pop artists, who saw in Duchamp’s readymades examples for their use of objects from popular culture in art. Tipped off by her son, who was involved with the exhibition, the collector Mary Sisler decided to buy everything by Duchamp she could lay her hands on.^[1] The Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery in New York soon traced sixty-three works in France, and she bought them. They included a parcel of seventy-nine notes, which were not included in La boîte verte and which Duchamp would go on to publish in La boîte blanche in 1967. Sisler’s collection also contained fourteen replicas of the readymades that were put on the market in an edition of eight by the Milanese gallery owner Arturo Schwarz in 1964. After starting at the Cordier & Eckstrom Gallery in January 1965, Sisler’s collection travelled to a number of cities in the United States and afterwards to Australia and New Zealand.

Duchamp designed the invitation for the preview in New York on 13 January 1965. He chose a playing card with a picture of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (c. 1503) on it, under which he wrote the inscription rasée L.H.O.O.Q. He was referring to his action in 1919 when he put a moustache and goatee on a postcard of the Mona Lisa and the inscription L.H.O.O.Q., which spoken aloud in French sounds like ‘She has a hot arse’. The inscription alludes to Da Vinci’s possible homosexuality that Freud had written about.^[2] Duchamp’s action would also have suggested a sneer at the absurd popularity of the painting by Da Vinci in 1919 during the celebration of the four-hundredth anniversary of the artist’s death, and as a result was ideal to be turned into a Dadaist caricature.^[3] The original L.H.O.O.Q. is in Sisler’s collection. Her collecting passion is evidence of how much Duchamp’s popularity was also linked to idolatrous admiration. Viewed in this light, this invitation card can be understood as an ironic comment on his own success. The memory of his earlier action may also have been sparked by the mass stampede in 1963 in Washington and New York when the Mona Lisa was lent by the Louvre. Over a period of six weeks almost two million visitors in packed queues shuffled along past the painting.

The title Not seen and/or less seen of/by Marcel Duchamp and/or Rrose Sélavy 1904-1964 should also be understood as ironic. Apart from the first part of the sentence, Not seen and/or less seen, it corresponds to the title that he had given to his own retrospectives of his oeuvre in La boîte-en-valise and in Pasadena. The addition could indicate that he was not responsible for the compilation of this exhibition.