Mona Lisa with a mustache sold over half a million dollars

[SergeiSK]

One of the most famous paintings of world art, Mona Lisa (La Gioconda) by Leonardo da Vinci, with a penciled mustache and goatee considered an icon of pop art, and sold at auction at Christie's in New York for nearly half a million dollars, five times more expensive than the expectations of the organizers of the auction.
Mustache and goatee on the most common printing paper copies of textbook masterpieces scribbled in pencil are not naughty schoolboy, and the French artist Marcel Duchamp, nisprovergatel classical canons and one of the founders of conceptualism.
In 1964 he produced 38 such moustached Mona Lisa at auction in New York was exposed to a copy number 21. Connoisseur of life and work of Leonardo as a great and shocking Duchamp saw it as a mustached Mona Lisa sensational at the time hints of the Freudian sense.
Abbreviation, which are equipped with all 38 masterpieces Duchamp, only adds spice to art of "reading" the classics. Over the years, the artist himself in translating coded quotations in English and gave it more acceptable to the public sound, according to RIA Novosti.
"This is one of the greatest icons of XX century and a joke, of course. But the joke has given direction to many masters of pop art, as Warhol, Lichtenstein, Prince ... All of them were for Duchamp "- said vice-president of trading house Brett Gorvi.
(RIA Novosti)