Art is a form of self-expression that has meaning for the person who is creating it. It might also represent a continuation of someone's views, ideals, or ideas. In this essay, I'll concentrate on the works of a variety of famous artists, including Marcel Duchamp, who is known for creating a mocking replica of the Mona Lisa that sports a mustache. In addition, I'll talk about both of Andy Warhol's paintings of Leonardo da Vinci's famous Mona Lisa, which he created in the 1960s using colored paint. Furthermore, I will touch on Robert Mapplethorpe’s 1978 original ‘Self Portrait with Whip’, while comparing all the afore- mentioned artists and their life’s work.
Marcel Duchamp's Mona Lisa:
Fig. 1: Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q., (1919)
In association with the Futurist movements, Surrealist, Dada, Cubist, and, Marcel Duchamp fundamentally overthrows traditional practices of art making and their display, inspiring such substantial concepts as the purity of the art entity and the hand of the artist. Duchamp’s depiction of his work is famous for the simplicity of his creations while placing unprecedented emphasis on the artistic perception as paramount over aesthetics or craftsmanship. Moreover, Chused (p.163) establishes that the painter uses a guiding principle that hugely proves influential to the artistic practice of the 20th-century.
Marcel Duchamp (1887- 1968), begun gaining recognition in 1917 for his sense of humour, which is evident in his art by submitting, a urinal to a New York art show, under the name R Mutt. Anonymously, Duchamp was in defence of the R Mutt title in a magazine, giving a definition of his then, the new art of the readymade. Furthermore, to create an entirely original ideology to his art object, he would take an everyday article, and place it in a manner that its usual significance masks the new article under the title, thus distorting the initial point of view.
In the masterpiece, various distinguishing features, including The Mona Lisa's round face and deep-set eyes were in harmony with Duchamp's act of violence. The moustache and beard centre the creation of Duchamp humour, bringing to life the thought of the Mona Lisa being a real man, rather than the disguise of a woman as a man. Therefore, it hints at a distinct meaning from sabotage, for all the coarseness of the L.H.O.O.Q. Initials voice the French meaning of, "She has a hot arse." Arguably, his work is not an attack on the tourist icon the Mona Lisa was, but rather an interpretation of the piece. According to Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis of Leonardo's art, he tries to relate the artist's sexual life to art for the failure in completing his works. Concluding the argument that Leonardo was homosexual (Carol P, p. 84).
Duchamp's Mona Lisa is merely a Freudian joke. For the artist reveals, in a simple gesture, what the painting conceals. In other terms, Duchamp unearths an ambiguity of gender, in a sense where Leonardo perceives the male form in the female at the heart of Leonardo's aesthetic. Duchamp discovers a hidden self- portrait in his rectified readymade. Leonardo's masterpiece is redeemable by the Dadaist intervention of Duchamp from the triviality of reproduction, hence returning the artwork to the private world of creation.
Andy Warhol's Marilyn
Fig 2: Andy Warhol's Mona Lisa, 1963
Fig 3: Andy Warhol Untitled from Marilyn Monroe 1967
For about 500 years Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa has been one of the most recognisable paintings in the world. Since her making in 1503, she has become the ultimate Pop icon, so it is unsurprising that while on a wildly successful tour of the United States in 1963, Mona Lisa caught the attention of Andy Warhol, the chronicler of modern culture. Stimulated as much by the universal nature of the copy as its historical significance, Warhol production of seven canvases using Leonardo da Vinci’s famed painting as his basis. Klein, (p. 61) says, the largest works in this collection, Colored Mona Lisa, is regarded among the most striking and momentous paintings of the artist’s new profession.
By assembling this progression of colourful images of the Mona Lisa, Warhol not only commented on the ubiquitous nature of one of the most reproduced painting images in modern society but also on the means of production. Within the surface of this large-scale canvas, we see evidently see the artist’s exceptional skill to capture the zeitgeist of a particular moment in time and provide an early sample of his prescient ability to identify the emergence of a nascent age in which high art and consumer culture would become intimately connected.
Mapplethorpe's Self Portrait with Whip
Fig 4: Robert Mapplethorpe’s Self Portrait with Whip, 1978
In the 1970s, Robert Mapplethorpe and poet, musician, and artist Patti Smith lived together in New York’s infamous Chelsea Hotel where he began shooting Polaroids to use in his collages. According to Anić, Ivana, Mapplethorpe got a Hasselblad medium-format camera and began taking pictures of his friends and acquaintances, who were, socialites, musicians, artists, members of the gay S & M, and pornographic film stars (Anić, Ivana, p.23). Despite his offensive content, Mapplethorpe was a formalist, interested in composition, balance, texture, colour, and mainly, beauty. In the 1980s, his focus on studio photography, especially flowers, nudes, and formal portraits that are considerably more refined than his prior work. After Mapplethorpe, had died from an AIDS-related illness, his work precipitated national controversy when his art’s inclusion in “The Perfect Moment,” a travelling exhibition sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Mapplethorpe’s personalities, sightseen over the years in an assortment of self-portraits, hardly signal a sloughing off of the limitations of the Catholic religion he grew up practising. Rather, his various appearances; femme fatale, a gay sex fiend, militia man, reveal a committed exploration of Catholic themes conversant throughout art history. Furthermore, the degradation and transcendence of the flesh; confession, transgression and punishment; ecstasy and agony. Anić, Ivana,(p.27) suggests that Germano Celant, art historian and curator’s view of Mapplethorpe was profoundly spiritual, but he rushed headlong into the dark side of religion. His actions were a “Catholic inversion” characterised by a lure to the demonic, the abject and the violent; all the while motivated toward an idea of redemption, the alteration of suffering into grace through stasis, balance, and beauty.
In the modern era, attitudes towards Aids and homosexuality have changed, both of which seemingly hit nerves among individual members of the community. Besides, attacks against The Perfect Moment suggests a fear of contagion from the works on view, a visceral and irrational response born out of a climate of political ignorance regarding the functions and capabilities of the disease. Also, at that time, it was so little understood; by only observing at the artistic work or by being in the same room with it, the author claims that one risked infection with the HIV. Lastly, it is evident that most or all of the men depicted in the photographs were dying or had died, of the disease as a consequence of their behaviours.
Today the X Portfolio images are difficult to look at, and they still are, it has more to do with the violence than the sexuality. The flinch one sense in response to an image such as Lou, NYC (1978) (a portrait of a Pinkie thrust into a urethra) is a spasm of natural empathy, not so dissimilar from perceiving a razor blade slit an eyeball, as in Un Chien Andalou film by Luis Bunuel’s. However, if the homosexual content has lost some of its strings, the child nudity is still illegal. If anything, concern over the mistreatment of children remains a sensitive issue in the last 25 years; custodians today will tell you that Honey (1976) and Jessie McBride (1976) globally court more trouble.
We often ask if the exhibition was poorly considered on the part of Barrie, Kardon, among others who supported it, a grave misjudgement regarding what American audiences needed or were prepared to see. Was fisting something people ought to know about? Or did they not? Mapplethorpe was not a visible political artist, but his retrospectives occurred during a period of stubborn cultural and political conservatism. Then, of course, The Perfect Moment kindled two huge political arguments within that art form.
Britt Salvesen (p. 9) bluntly says, Mapplethorpe’s work was deliberately provocative and, in some ways, that was just a device to get attention, an element of his career strategy. But provocation was also typical of the art of the late 1970s and 1980s, as seen in work by performance artist Karen Finley and by Mapplethorpe’s fellow photographers Nan Goldin, Peter Hujar and Serrano. Mapplethorpe had his perspective, his religion-metaphorical vision of S&M as contemporary theatre. Nonetheless, his work also claimed its place among the art struggle of its time, expressing the urgency of a political climate in which cities were deteriorating, lives lost to the scourge of Aids, and government response were to be openly antagonistic or turn a blind eye.
In that light, the defenders of The Perfect Moment might be one of the bravest and boldest art events of the 20th-century. It's incitement polarised communities but, in the end, a continuity of sorts gapped the moral universe open and almost immediately was imperfectly refastened.
Comparison of the artist’s pieces
Leonardo Da Vinci Mona Lisa, Renaissance original, first travelled on loan from the Louvre in Paris to the United States on December 14, 1962, and exhibited first at the National Gallery in Washington in early 1963, and then for three weeks at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Although, this produced massive attention. Around 1.6 million viewers walked past Da Vinci’s painting. According to critic Robert Hughes, The Mona Lisa treatment “as though it were a film star, results in people coming not only to look at it, but also to say that they’d seen it.”
Leonardo's Mona Lisa is the world’s most iconic picture, and the visit to the United States verify as iconic as any modern movie star. Warhol was fascinated and obsessed with the celebrity cult, and he recognized that the Mona Lisa had become a star similar to Marilyn Monroe, a subject he explored in other of his paintings. The suggestions of Chused and Richard H (p.163) leads us to believe that Warhol’s brilliance resulted in making more than twenty silkscreen paintings of Marilyn. All paintings based on the same publicity photograph from the 1953 film Niagara and gave her the same silkscreen surface treatment as for the Mona Lisa repeating her face from edge to edge of the canvas. Warhol found in Monroe as in the Mona Lisa one of his consistent themes: the cult of celebrity. Everybody becomes a star to his gaze. For Lisa, del Giaconda a single image was the entire basis of her fame, unlike Monroe, whose chaotic life becomes a platform for criticism of the modern art world.
Aware of the celebrity status that Da Vinci’s painting achieved, Warhol would offer an entire series and multiple versions in various sizes of the Mona Lisa, including several diptychs. His most ambitious were a five-by-six grid called Thirty Are Better Than One were the Mona Lisa is reduced to a pattern. Andy Warhol turned icons into his kind of figures, not least in his series of Mona Lisas, the overexposed image became an infatuation which would last throughout his career.
Moreover, in comparison, all the fabulous masterpieces are a notion of glamour. Having pivotal validity which is attached to the ‘Mona Lisaboth’ for the painting’s sovereignty as a work of art and for the spell it still cast upon our successive generations. Furthermore, the author sets aside Warhol who took the image for his prints straight from the Met’s brochure illustration of the original Mona Lisa as his source. He uniquely used the technique of silkscreen ink on synthetic polymer paint on canvas (James, p. 84). The size of the image is 319,4 x 208.6 cm. Warhol uses cyan, magenta and yellow plus black. He overprints the image arbitrarily giving a sharp resistant look to the print. He replicated several times onto the canvas the image he took from the Met's catalogue creating a copy of a copy.
In this reinterpretation of Da Vinci’s art classical masterpiece, Chused and Richard H (p. 163) claim that Warhol followed his famous predecessor Marcel Duchamp’s footsteps. In 1919 Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) used a cheap postcard reproduction of Leonardo’s masterpiece. In doing so, he drew a moustache and beard on her smiling face in pencil and titled it L. H. O. O. Q a pun, since the letters when translated in French formula it depicts the meaning of “Elle a chaud au cul”, plainly “She is hot in the arse”. Thus, the masterpiece of Duchamp, similarly to da Vinci's painting have a different perspective from the colour based art of Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe.
Matt Wrbican, The Warhol’s archivist and curator of ‘Twisted Pair: Marcel Duchamp/Andy Warhol’, an exhibition at The Andy Warhol Museum in September 2010, examines the artistic links between this two art giant and explores Warhol’s considerable interest in and indebtedness to Duchamp. Warhol had Duchamp’s name in his address manuscript, but they were believed to be more of associates than friends. Wrbican considers the pair as the Da Vinci and Michelangelo of Contemporary Art, the most important and influential artists of the 20th century.
Work cited
Anić, Ivana. "Beyond the Binary-Representing Queer Bodies in Mid to Late 20th Century American Photography in the Works of Diane Arbus and Robert Mapplethorpe." (2014):17-29
Chused, Richard H. "The legal culture of appropriation art: The future of copyright in the remix age." Tul. J. Tech. & Intell. Prop. 17 (2014): 163.
Dittmar, Linda, and Joseph Entin. "Jamming the Works: Art, Politics and Activism: Introduction." Radical Teacher 100 (2014): 1.
James, Carol P. "Duchamp's Early Readymades: The Erasure." Perspectives on Contemporary Literature: Literature and the Other Arts 13 (2015): 24.
Klein, Eva. "Multiple Mona Lisa." Advertising and Design: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on a Cultural Field (2014): 61.
Martineau, Paul, and Britt Salvesen. Robert Mapplethorpe: The Photographs. Getty Publications, 2016.
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