Thank you for stealing the Mona Lisa

On a Monday morning in August 1911, Vincenzo Peruggia, a handyman who had helped put in the museum’s protective glass, came out of a storeroom where he’d spent the night, lifted the panel off its hooks, slipped it under his smock and walked out. Nobody noticed for most of the day. The guards figured it was off being photographed.

The museum closed for a week. When it reopened, people lined up to look at four iron hooks. Kafka and Max Brod were in Paris that fall and went to see the gap. The face was on front pages for weeks; Apollinaire spent a few days in jail on suspicion, and Picasso was brought in for questioning. For two years the painting was only reproductions and rumor, and somewhere in there it became the most recognized picture in the world. Peruggia had it the whole time, in a trunk in his room in Paris. In December 1913 he took it to Florence and offered it to an art dealer, Alfredo Geri, who called the police. The painting came home with a story attached, and that story is a large part of why people still line up to see it.

In April 1957, Duchamp gave a short talk in Houston called “The Creative Act.” His argument was that an artist can only take a work partway. You start with an intention, you end up with an object, and there’s always a gap between the two. The viewer closes it by looking, interpreting and deciding what the thing is worth. In his words, the creative act “is not performed by the artist alone.”

He’d been working that way for a long time. In 1919 he drew a mustache and goatee on a postcard of the Mona Lisa, lettered L.H.O.O.Q. underneath, and left the joke for the viewer to find by reading it out loud. She’s been the picture people reach for ever since when they want to argue about copies and who owns an icon.

This project takes his idea one step further. A viewer who looks and interprets still walks away and leaves the piece on the wall. Here the viewer has to become a collaborator. You decided to lift it off the hook and carry it out, and that’s what completed it.

Movies keep coming back to Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, usually as the thing in the heist, and now and then as a clue in a story about someone hiding who they are.

The letters are a joke you only get by saying them out loud. Read them one at a time in French and you’re saying the letter names: elle, ache, o, o, cu. Say them fast and they run together into a sentence.

Word by word:

elle

she

a

has

chaud

hot

au

at the, in the

cul

ass

Literally it’s “she has a hot ass,” and it’s slang for being turned on. Cul is the vulgar word, nearer to arse than to bottom.

So Duchamp put a mustache on the most respected woman in painting and captioned her with a dirty joke that stays hidden until somebody reads it aloud. The frames use the same trick. Now you know what yours says.