A Favorite Painting 12

Marcel DuChamp, L.H.O.O.Q, c1919

Technically, this isn't a painting (rather, it's a defaced poster), and there are actually multiple versions of it created by DuChamp over the years. But I like it (because it makes me laugh), so I thought I'd share it with my readers. Duchamp was something of the court jester of the art world in the first half of the twentieth century, especially once he'd hit on his idea of the readymades (of which this work is an example). He took ordinary objects he found, gave them a little spin, and mounted them in museums and galleries to see what outrage they might spark. Aside from L.H.O.O.Q., his most famous readymade was probably the urinal he placed on its back, signed it "R. Mutt" and gave it the title Fountain. But the piece above is his real masterpeice of that period, calling into question all the traditional ideas of art and beauty that dominated Western Culture at the time of the first world war. In some ways, it serves as a prelude for understanding Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of the Enlightenment, which twenty odd years later diagnosed the rise of fascism as an unfortunate, but probably inevitable, outcome of all the noble ideas that launched the American and French Revolutions (you know, "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" and "liberte, egalite, fraternite"). It's easy to read DuChamp's work as a response to the horrors of World War I, perpetrated by the so-called civilized nations of Europe who celebrated the productions of DaVinci and Rembrandt and Goethe and so many others as evidence of their advanced state, even as they ripped each other to shreds in the trenches. Maybe I should revise what I said above-- this piece makes me laugh, but it also makes me think about the circumstances that made such a laugh necessary, and in the end, that's kind of sad.