The avant garde as seen in a rear view mirror

Five Way Portrait of Marcel Duchamp (click to enlarge)

"Cubism -- highly influential visual arts style of the 20th century that was created principally by the painters Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in Paris between 1907 and 1914. The Cubist style emphasized the flat, two-dimensional surface of the picture plane, rejecting the traditional techniques of perspective, foreshortening, modeling, and chiaroscuro and refuting time-honoured theories of art as the imitation of nature. Cubist painters were not bound to copying form, texture, colour, and space; instead, they presented a new reality in paintings that depicted radically fragmented objects, whose several sides were seen simultaneously." [source]

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"With his next major work, Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) he (Marcel Duchamp) began to break from Cubism.

There are some familiar traces of Cubism here. For instance, the painting has a limited color scheme of browns and muted yellow, and the subject (the nude figure) is splintered into abstract, geometric forms. But while most early Cubist works focused on static or even motionless subjects, like still lifes or portraits of seated people, Duchamp's Nude depicts its subject in motion.

The barely-recognizable nude is shown from numerous points of view all at once, frozen in time. It's as if Duchamp was trying to paint thirty paintings at once, one for each step down the stairs. The background of the painting is also more faded than the foreground, making it seem like the nude is walking forward to the viewer." [source]

Copying the Mona Lisa

Copying the Mona Lisa (click any image to enlarge)

I found the above picture at Vintage Everyday's post Photos of Louvre in 1953. The center painting in it is the Mona Lisa. After being surprised how it was hung -- for some reason I had always imagined it being in a room by itself -- I started wondering how one went about getting permission to setup an easel next to it and paint a copy. 

I searched the web a bit trying to find out how one applies for permission to copy it in person, but had no luck finding any information. That's probably a good thing, I doubt they would have approved of my plan of using a paintball gun to reproduce it. Alas, us great arteests are always misunderstood in our own time.

I did find out that the Mona Lisa was stolen in 1911 by Vincenzo Peruggia, a worker at the Louvre. He was arrested a couple of years later, and the painting returned when, claiming he wanted it returned to its rightful place in Italy, he tried to sell it to a couple of Italian collectors. Peruggia became a sort of Italian hero because of his story and only spent a year in jail.

Later a con artist named Marques Eduardo de Valfierno claimed he was the one who actually planned the heist and hired Peruggia to carry it out. He further claimed that he had several copies made which he sold to private collectors and netted $90 million in the process. Sadly, as colorful as his story was, none of it ever checked out.

I also found out that the Prado Museum in Spain as discovered they have what is believed a contemporaneous copy of the Mona Lisa. Below is a detail of that copy. They think that it was painted by an apprentice of Leonardo. 

Detail of the Prado Museum's copy of the Mona Lisa

And finally there is Marcel Duchamp's Mona Lisa which is a significant piece of art from the Dada movement. Not a copy, it is a print of the Mona Lisa on which Duchamp scribbled a moustache and goatee and inscribed "L.H.O.O.Q." which, when spelled out in French, forms a pun which translates to "She has hot pants." 

 Detail of Marcel Duchamp's Mona Lisa

Mohammed Descending a Staicase

Whoops, I forgot Draw Mohamed Day. I never drew a picture of Mohammed which naturally makes posting one a bit of a problem. 

Facing that quandary I consider myself lucky to have remembered Marcel Duchamp and his readymades. A readymade is an "ordinary object elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist."

So, to solve my lack of a Mohammed drawing on this most solemn of Draw Mohamed Days, I found a copy of Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase and have readymaded it into a new piece of art which I call Mohammed Descending a Staircase. That's it to the left.


If you happen to be a jihadist, rest assured -- even though the details are a bit obscured -- it is a very, very offensive picture of Mohammed and you should be deeply outraged by it.

For the rest of us that are sane, well yes... I suppose I am torturing the definition of readymade a bit. It is a stretch to call me an artist, and I'm not sure that elevating a piece of art into another piece of art is quite within the rules of readymades. Still, Draw Mohamed Day is upon us, and so an artist has to do what an artist has to do.