Mona Lisa Travels. III. Mona Lisa in the Art of the 20th Century
MARC SCHEPS
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.
Thus, the Mona Lisa was now greeted with scorn and often with biting irony; an iconoclastic flood swirled about her face and tried to wrest from her the secret of her origin and to topple her from the pedestal on which she had been enthroned for so long.
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.
All of this led to the artists rejecting the commercial misuse of the Mona Lisa but nonetheless being fascinated by the secret of her success, which had turned a simple portrait into the absolute icon of Western culture and the legacy of the spirit of the Renaissance.
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.
From the series Mona Lisa Goes Russia: In museum depot. With paintings by Kazimir Malevich 2001, St. Petersburg. L-Print, 120×150 cm
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?
KAZIMIR MALEVICH, 1878–1935
Solar Eclipse with Mona Lisa, 1914
Kasimir Malewitsch, Solar Eclipse with Mona Lisa, 1914. Oil and paper on canvas, 62×49,5 cm The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg
The fact that Malevich was the first to integrate the portrait of Mona Lisa into a work of modern art is less important than the meaning he intended to convey by this gesture.
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 1911, Malevich adopeted the analytical Cubism practiced by Picasso and Braque, but in 1914 started to take it in a new direction, developing «alogism», a form of transrationality (Zaoum, in Russian).
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.»
Stolen in 1911, Leonardo’s picture had since the beginning of the year in which the painting was executed been restored to its place in the Louvre, which gave rise to countless press commentaries. Malevich was thus reacting to a real event, while at the same time proclaiming that Mona Lisa’s days of glory were now over and a new icon of modernism was appearing over the horizon: the Black Square of Suprematism.
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.
MARCEL DUCHAMP, 1887–1968
L.H.O.O.Q., 1919
Duchamp’s iconoclastic act, which consisted of taking a print of the Mona Lisa and adding a mustache and goatee along with the five letters L.H.O.O.Q. — which, if read quickly, sound like «elle a chaud au cul» (she has a hot ass) — can by no means be reduced to a mere Dadaist joke designed to demystify the work of Leonardo.
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?
Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q., 1919. Pencil on a reproduction of the Mona Lisa, 19,7×12,4 cm Collection Tarica Ltd., Paris
Duchamp created his first readymades in 1913, but only after his return from the United States did he conceive the «corrected» («rectifié») readymade L.H.O.O.Q.
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.
Duchamp incidentally refers back to this work several times, especially in 1965 when he decides not to «correct» a further reproduction, instead writing above the letters L.H.O.O.Q. the word «rasée» (shaved). He wished to express with this comment that the male attributes are not necessarily required to prove sexual identity, pointing to the androgynous quality the Mona Lisa already possessed.
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.
FERNAND LÉGER, 1881–1955
Mona Lisa with Keys, 1930
Fernand Léger, Mona Lisa with Keys, 1930. Oil on canvas, 19,7×2,4 cm. Musée national Fernand Léger, Biot
With this painting, we find ourselves in the period in which Léger places objects in an imaginary space — as an heir to both Cubism and Surrealism. Keys appear in his work starting in 1927, first as isolated objects, then grouped together on a key chain. Even before the Mona Lisa, the key chain can be found in association with female dancers. Instinctively, one thinks of the symbolic meaning of the key as a male element that opens the female lock. Moreover, Mona Lisa is reduced here to one object among others; she is cut out from her setting and floats in an abstract space, partially overlapped by the key chain. Léger painted her in a greenish blue tone, deliberately making reference to Leonardo’s famous «sfumato». He remarked that he had chosen her at random after seeing a reproduction somewhere.
As object, she was thus neither more nor less valuable than the red sardine can in the upper part of the picture.
Léger made no secret of his poor opinion of Renaissance painting, which in his opinion was completely preoccupied with depicting reality rather than trying to recreate it. The Mona Lisa is reduced to an object/woman; she looks like a foreign body in the picture, reserved and unapproachable, passive and unmoving compared to the dynamic impression made by the other elements in the composition. All that’s left of her is the faded memory of a world that has vanished forever. In his picture, Léger celebrates the cheerful momentum of a modern world that is in the process of discovering and conquering new spaces for painting, a world in which the Mona Lisa has to make do with the status now assigned to her — as a trinket from the pawnshop.
SALVADOR DALÍ, 1904–1989
Mona Lisa, 1953 Photo by Philippe Halsman
Salvador Dalí, Mona Lisa, 1953. Photo by Philippe Halsman, 19,7×2,4 cm, Collection Arturo Schwarz, Milan
This photograph is the result of a joint project by Dalí and the photographer Halsman. Dalí of course admired Duchamp immensely and therefore when he took up the subject more than 30 years after Duchamp’s iconoclastic act, he had to outdo his idol’s Dadaist stance and make the picture of Mona Lisa his own.
The master of self-dramatization evidently wanted to totally identify with the Mona Lisa and to say with his artwork: «She is I, and I am she». Based on this equation, Dalí’s famous mustache would first grace the face of the Mona Lisa, but in order not to simply repeat Duchamp’s gesture, he and the photographer decided to also give her Dalí’s eyes as well as hands filled with money. Instead of referencing Freud’s psychoanalysis, which he knew well and echoes of which can be found in his work, and instead of taking up Duchamp’s sexual innuendo, Dalí overlaid his own myth on the Mona Lisa, emptying the picture of its content once and for all — except for its fame. This is incidentally not the only reference to the Mona Lisa in his work; she can also be seen in his picture Imperial Monument to the Child-Woman from 1929.
RENÉ MAGRITTE, 1898–1967
Mona Lisa, 1960
A painting by Magritte is above all a picture. But once it’s painted, it needs a title to be complete.
In a letter to André Bosmans, Magritte remarked: «The title given to a picture melds with the picture… The terms of an image and its title are not amenable to change when they are the terms of an absolute way of thinking». When he painted the Mona Lisa in 1960, he took up elements that had already long been a part of his visual vocabulary, such as the curtains, the sky and the bells. His first curtain dates to 1925, and would later surface again in Les Misanthropes, painted in 1942. The round bells as well can already be found in the 1920s, just like the blue sky and white clouds.
René Magritte, Mona Lisa, 1960. Oil on canvas, 70×50 cm. Private collection
After the Mona Lisa, Magritte painted a whole series of works incorporating these elements, especially the curtains, which bear titles like L’Ovation, La Peine Perdue (Futile Effort) and Le Beau Monde.
A letter from Magritte to Bosmans about Le Beau Monde has been preserved that explains the connections between these paintings and sheds light on the thought process behind the titles the artist gave them: «I have however painted a picture that is, so I believe, an astounding variation on the Mona Lisa: blue curtains, one of them with clouds before a dark sky, in the distance the sea and in the foreground the beach. The interesting thing about this picture appears to me to be — in particular — that the same curtain is shown, calling once again for a quite fortunate presence of mind on our part; i.e. with other thoughts in mind we would have to call this picture something other than Mona Lisa.» In another letter he writes of the curtains: «They do not stand for the idea of hiding; they are the thing that hides. That hides what can be hidden, i.e. the secret».
The curtain for Magritte is hence what hides the secret of the Mona Lisa; it is in a sense the portrait of this woman, who has hidden her secret for five centuries behind an enigmatic smile. The middle curtain with the clouded sky is like a void in the center of the picture and takes the place of the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci. Like her, it takes up the foreground of the picture. Its glow replaces that of the face, and the slit in the bell could certainly be an ironic allusion to the unreadable smile of the Mona Lisa. If one wanted to parody Magritte himself, one could say, «This is not the Mona Lisa», since she is named although she does not appear in the picture and the curtain hides «what can be hidden», i.e. her secret.
Around 1964, Magritte went on to paint a gouache titled Mona Lisa, containing the same elements. He describes it thus: «The sky has the form of a curtain, since it hides something from us. We are surrounded by curtains». Magritte’s cloud-dotted skies are curtains that conceal the invisible and the innumerable secrets of the universe. The Mona Lisa is surely one of those secrets that fascinate us and that we want to decipher. Incidentally, a few months before his death, Magritte selected a few pictures at the suggestion of Alexander Iola to make into sculptures. The Mona Lisa was one of them, and Magritte supervised the casting work and made the necessary corrections. But the works were not cast in bronze until after his death. His wish to paint the bronze version of the Mona Lisa would remain unfulfilled.
JASPER JOHNS, born 1930
Racing Thoughts, 1983
Three artists had a substantial influence on Johns: Leonardo, Cézanne and Duchamp. He dedicated various works to a dialogue with Leonardo and Cézanne, but Duchamp’s oeuvre fascinated him his whole life long. Starting in 1957, his work, like Rauschenberg’s, was classified as Neodadaist. The two artists visited the Duchamp collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art together. Johns would continue to encounter Duchamp frequently. This is why the image of the Mona Lisa that appears several times in his works can be taken as a double reference, to both Leonardo and Duchamp. When he uses it in his graphics series Color Numerals 0-9, incorporating it into Figure 7, this is by no means a random decision, but rather a modest tribute to two great spirits he much admires.
Jasper Johns, Racing Thoughts, 1983. Encaustic and collage on canvas, 121,9×190,8 cm. Whitney Museum of American Art
In Racing Thoughts, of which there is also a second version, he depicts objects that are part of his studio and thus of his intellectual universe. We would like to focus here only on the three painted images in the composition: the photograph of Leo Castelli, the famous gallerist who played such an important role in fostering American Pop Art, including the work of Johns and Rauschenberg; the engraving by Barnett Newman, the great American artist who was a member of the generation preceding Johns’; and the reproduction of the Mona Lisa, which symbolizes both the painterly tradition since the Renaissance as well as Duchamp, the pioneer of modern art.
By including elements that quote his own work, along with the skull, which functions as a «memento mori», the artist supplies us here with a veritable autobiography.
No sign of iconoclasm can be found; the Mona Lisa once again conveys here values that are vital to contemporary art, functioning as a reference image like that by Barnett Newman, a picture that stands by its origins, but which also stands up to the criticism it was subjected to in the first half of the 20th century.
ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG, born 1925
Pneumonia Lisa (Japanese Recreational Clayworks), 1982
Rauschenberg is a master of the art of bringing together disparate images and creating from them a work that is open to myriad interpretations. His famous Combine Paintings contained both silkscreen prints reproducing photographs of artworks or everyday objects as well as real objects, with all of these elements melded together through the creative act. In this work, the Mona Lisa motif is multiplied four times, each time undergoing an osmosis through overlaid silkscreens and painting. Rauschenberg wants to show us that one can duplicate an image without repeating it and in this way build a bridge between the mechanical reproduction of the image and its uniqueness.
Robert Rauschenberg, Pneumonia Lisa (Japanese Recreational Clayworks), 1982. Transfer onto fired Japanese art ceramic, 81,9×219,7 cm. Collection of the artist
But beyond tackling this prblem of contemporary art, he is also trying to confront the myth of the Mona Lisa with cultural contexts that are completely alien to her. For years, Rauschenberg pursued an adventure that took him to many countries, in each of which he devoted himself to initiating a cultural dialogue. Keeping in mind that millions of Japanese saw Leonardo’s Mona Lisa when she was exhibited there, it was naturally tempting for him to envision a more profound dialogue between this mythical figure, which was created in Europe but is nonetheless universal, and the country that produced its own sublime images of the female.
TOM WESSELMANN, 1931–2004
Great American Nude #31, 1962
Tom Wesselmann, Great American Nude #31, 1962. Mixed media on canvas. Private collection
Wesselmann glorified the American female nude, capturing her status between myth and reality, PR and everyday life, the public and the private.
His series of Great American Nudes portrays a free and unchaste side of American consumer society that radiates the optimism of uninhibited good health. These nudes are contextualized against a decorative background, usually an interior. In No. 31, a reproduction of the Mona Lisa forms a marked antithesis to this interior with its large nude — to the extent that it almost irritates our eyes. This is not only a juxtaposition of two diametrically opposed visions of the female, but also of two antithetical representational modes, the one with its illusionistic depth striving for an absolutely realistic depiction and the other rendered in broad, flat surfaces using lively, invented colors.
The distance between the two realms, whether psychological, spiritual, perspectival, conceptual or chromatic, is practically insurmountable. On the one side the myth of the European Renaissance, on the other the myth of contemporary America. One female looks out at us, while the other offers up her body to our gaze; the contrast could hardly be greater.
ANDY WARHOL, 1928–1987
Mona Lisa, 1963
The Mona Lisa’s visit to the United States in 1963 prompted Warhol to take her up in his repertoire of stars. At that point, the artist had already developed his system of mechanical image repetition using silkscreen. The Mona Lisa thus fit in perfectly between Marilyn and Liz Taylor, stars whose image was constantly spread by the media. Moreover, Marilyn represented a myth that was just in the process of unfolding, and Warhol was surely aware of the potential of treating another myth that was more than 450 years old and was suddenly in the headlines in a similar way.
Andy Warhol, Mona Lisa, 1963. Silkscreen on canvas, 325×208 cm. Collection of E. Ward, New York
In this work, Warhol seems to want to print the image, and sometimes only a detail of it, without a pre-planned arrangement, in primary colors and different sizes and orientations. This suggests that it is ultimately just an image and that this image does not necessarily deserve our veneration. Other pictures, such as the Four Mona Lisas, evince an organizational structure; the most famous of these is without doubt Thirty Are Better Than One, also from 1963. Warhol was interested in how the image of a person or painting, both things that are in essence unique, could be reproduced endlessly in the media. In the case of Mona Lisa, Warhol is also thinking of Duchamp, whom he once met and even filmed.
Ultimately, Warhol creates here a multiple Ready-made; he takes up Duchamp’s one-time gesture and reproduces it ad infinitum, thus making a comment on its status as mechanical image in the age of global dissemination. Warhol, like Dalí, was also destined to become a legendary figure.
Incidentally, Warhol, the specialist in myths, was unable to remain indifferent to Leonardo; he devoted a late cycle, perhaps his most ambitious, to the Renaissance artist’s famous fresco The Last Supper. After 20th-century scholars had begun focusing on Leonardo as inventor, Warhol was now turning his attention to Leonardo as a religious man. Perhaps he already had a presentiment of this when he tried to decipher Mona Lisa’s smile and to probe the secrets of her gaze.
SHUSAKU ARAKAWA, born 1936, together with MADELINE GINS, born 1941
Splitting of Meaning, 7.1, Portrait of Mona Lisa, 1963–73
This work is part of an ambitious project called The Mechanism of Meaning, which the artists for the most part conceived and executed between 1963 and 1973 and which consists of a cycle of 83 works divided into 16 chapters. The cycle represents a key moment in Conceptual Art, and Arakawa, who came to the United States from Japan in 1961, is regarded as a forerunner of this movement. The Mechanism of Meaning develops a systematic catalogue of possibilities for how meaning is produced from the process of perception. The seventh chapter is devoted to the Splitting of Meaning and consists of seven works. The first is the Portrait of Mona Lisa and the last, titled Next to the Last, refers to Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper.
Shusaku Arakawa, Splitting of Meaning, 7.1, Portrait of the Mona Lisa, 1963-73. Acrylic paint, oil, photo print on canvas
The Portrait of Mona Lisa is accompanied by a text that occupies the upper section of the canvas and explains what constitutes this Splitting of Meaning: «Exercises to demonstrate the disjunction, disassociation, abstraction, branching and ramifications pertaining to signification». These words manifest the influence of Zen and Dada, both of which rebelled against established ways of thinking and sought a fruitful way to attain «illogical» meaning.
The image attached to the canvas underneath the text is a reproduction of Leonardo’s painting The Virgin and Child with St. Anne (1508 / 09), which is today in the Louvre. We can recognize the Duchampian tradition of irony here, since not only is the Virgin being confounded with the Mona Lisa, but the picture itself is signed La Gioconda, insinuating that the portrait of Mona Lisa is actually a self-portrait of Leonardo da Vinci.
Although Leonardo is not named, the key dates in his life are stenciled onto the reproduction with spray paint. Arakawa calls his work Portrait of Mona Lisa but doesn’t show her and speaks of Leonardo without naming him: he leaves us to deal with these fragments of meaning on our own. Their context might lead us astray, but at the same time can perhaps guide us to a truth that «normal» thinking would not be able to uncover. We thus gradually come to understand how this «mechanism of meaning» works. Other subchapters are called Localization and Transference, Reassembling, Mapping of Meaning and Construction of the Memory of Meaning. The first panel of the last-named subchapter shows a reversed hand-written text, recalling how Leonardo encoded his notebooks by writing from right to left. Like other projects, Arakawa’s work is situated on the point of intersection where the spirit of the artist and that of the scientist meet to form an indissoluble symbiosis.
DANIEL SPOERRI, born 1930
Using a Rembrandt as an Ironing Board, 1964
In 1960, Spoerri invented and presented his first Tableaux Piège, or Trap Pictures, shortly after joining the New Realists group founded that April. Spoerri had met Marcel Duchamp the year before and borrowed from him the idea of accident. But he decided not to isolate the readymade like Duchamp, but rather to leave the object in the place it normally occupies in everyday life, simply gluing it down to the table that had served as its «trap» and then hanging it on the wall like a painting. Spoerri expanded the list of possible objects considerably, in order to build a trap for reality, and thus developed later his Word Traps series (Platitudes en relief) in collaboration with Robert Filliou.
Daniel Spoerri, Using a Rembrandt as an Ironing Board, 1964. Chair, printed fabric, ironing board, 40×73×86 cm. Collection Arturo Schwarz, Milan
In Using a Rembrandt as an Ironing Board the name of the artist stands for all the great masters of a past whose ponderous legacy is only still of use as an ironing board. The name is interchangeable, since what we actually see is the portrait of Mona Lisa, while Leonardo’s name is not even mentioned. But the artwork is definitely about the Mona Lisa, because, despite the iconoclasm of Duchamp and the following generations, she is still hanging on the walls of the Louvre and attracting the masses. Spoerri cites Rembrandt in order to avoid naming Mona Lisa, to in a sense strip her of her identity and reduce her to the level of an anonymous and devalued object.
In the early 1960s, Spoerri and his friends took up the Dadaist torch and fought for a New Realism, i.e. for an art that finds its inspiration in everyday modern life, which takes its materials from reality itself and therefore dissociates itself from those who would look to the museum works of a bygone era for the next logical step in the progression. The Mona Lisa, reproduced here on a towel, has become a cliché that has lost its status as masterpiece, and the artist will in future seek his models instead in the urban environment, creating an art that relates to how we live today.
Humor is never in short supply in Spoerri’s works, and Rembrandt has fallen into the word trap the artist set for him — as long as we ourselves are not fooled by our own passion for art, which Spoerri would find troubling. In order to appease us, he explains: «Please don’t regard the Trap Pictures as art. A piece of information, yes, a provocation, a hint to the eye of regions it is not accustomed to noticing, nothing else».
Spoerri is a trap salesman; he hopes to appropriate a few fragments of a reality before it slips away from him. He traps it in order to wrest from it the ephemera and banality of the commonplace and thus retain a memory of it. This gesture defines his art, and thus she is once again caught in a trap — the Mona Lisa, who, despite being reduced to a less-than-honorable function, still retains her mythical standing and remains an eternal mystery.
OSVALDO ROMBERG, born 1938
Analysis of Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci, 1980
This work is part of a large-scale project for analyzing paintings that Romberg began in 1974 began and to which a traveling exhibition was devoted in 1981 titled Mythologies from Altamira to Manet: An Emotional Analysis of Art History. In 1984, Romberg represented Israel at the Venice Biennale, with the exhibition Art about Art, 1974–1984. The project is divided into three analyses: the first looking at the lines, circles and spirals that result from the human motor function; the second dealing with the chromatic color circle; and the third, to which the Analysis of Mona Lisa belongs, devoted to examining paintings.
Osvaldo Romberg, Analysis of the Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci, 1980. Collage, acrylic paint and pencil on paper, 70×100 cm. Private collection
The first of the two texts that accompany a reproduction of the picture describes the historical circumstances behind the life and work of Leonardo. In the second, Romberg explores the mechanism of the painting itself: its style and its metaphors. He describes the three horizontals that structure the picture by means of their opposition to the vertical element formed by the subject, and then analyzes the color: it is «atmospheric and is achieved by the overlaying of thin glazes that penetrate into the panel and make it appear as if lit from within».
The reproduction of the Mona Lisa is reduced to a visual reference that is surrounded by a complex analytical structure whose individual elements each represent different ways of approaching the work. Mona Lisa hence becomes here a pretense for applying a cognitive method to any work of art, and the development of this structure and its use become an artistic reality. Just as Duchamp compelled us to read the Mona Lisa in a new way by adding a mustache and the letters L.H.O.O.Q., Romberg is now forcing us to think again about what makes her such a one-of-a-kind picture and watershed in the history of art.
In the course of studying the Mona Lisa, Romberg also surely found himself and, good teacher that he is, he provides us with the key to embarking on our own search for our inner being, opening our eyes to the world through the filter of art. We’ll let Romberg have the last word here: «Art doesn’t only carry meaning, it can also mesmerize and awaken our sense of the miraculous; it embraces the secrets and revelations of existence».
YASUMASA MORIMURA, born 1951
Mona Lisa in its Origin, 1998 Mona Lisa in its Pregnancy, 1998 Mona Lisa in the Third Place, 1998
When Morimura created this trilogy, he already had a long career behind him of making famous Western images his own, especially such female figures as Edouard Manet’s Olympia and Lucas Cranach’s Judith. Here he was drawing on a well-known practice in the Japanese Kabuki theater. Two years before he executed his Mona Lisa series, he produced one based on popular images of Hollywood actresses. After that, he felt ready to put himself in Mona Lisa’s shoes. Unlike Duchamp and Dalí, he actually dresses up as Mona Lisa and leaves his sexual and cultural identity indeterminate. He creates a hermaphrodite being that, behind a female mask and attributes, possesses a repressed and yet undeniable male nature.
Yasumasa Morimura. 1998. Left: Mona Lisa in its Origin, 76×54 cm. Center: Mona Lisa in its Pregnancy, 76×54 cm. Right: Mona Lisa in the Third Place, 76×54 cm. Color photograph on canvas
Morimura is not content to just create a hybrid reality, though; taking recourse to the original painting, he derives from it various materials that he will use to come up with his three versions of the Mona Lisa. Mona Lisa in its Origin recreates Leonardo’s picture down to the last detail, therewith recalling the long history of copies and counterfeits that had already begun during Leonardo’s lifetime. In Mona Lisa in its Pregnancy Morimura takes up the theme of the nude Mona Lisa that originated in the 17th century in the works of the School of Fontainebleau. The pose of the hands is identical to the original, but the head is turned toward the viewer. Morimura does not stop at merely showing the breasts of his Mona Lisa as in the picture by Chantilly; he also exposes her pregnant belly and thus makes himself into the very symbol of femaleness, fertility, i.e. the reproduction of his own self. Morimura is not only dressed like a woman — he has now become a pregnant man, taking the process of his feminization to its logical extreme. For Mona Lisa in the Third Place, Morimura uses two drawings by Leonardo, A Fetus in the Uterus (1498) and Women’s Bodies (undated), in order to penetrate into the womb of the pregnant Mona Lisa. In this way, he demystifies the Mona Lisa and reduces her to a childbearing machine, a role that he in his costumed maleness himself assumes
