A collection of dadaist and surreal paintings, including Marcel Duchamp’s Mona Lisa With Mustache”, will be offered at Sotheby’s auction in Paris on October 21st. The collection owned by American Arthur Brand includes more than 120 pieces estimated individually between €12,000 and €1 million. In addition to Duchamp’s works, there are paintings by Salvador Dali, Kurt Schweitzer, Max Ernst, Francis Picabia, Man Rey and other great names of artistic avant-garde.
Mona Lisa With Mustache
Among the 16 offered Duchamp’s works is also part of the series “Boxes in the bag”, estimated at between 180,000 and 250,000 euros. Among the main objects is one of the versions of the painting “L.H.O.O.Q”, on which is Mona Lisa with mustache and beard, and is estimated at €400,000 to €600,000.
In L.H.O.O.Q. the objet trouvé (“found object”) is a cheap postcard reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa onto which Duchamp drew a moustache and beard in pencil and appended the title. The offered version was made in 1964, based on the original originated in Paris Centre Georges Pompidou, owned by French Communist Party. They received it as a gift from a poet Louis Aragon, who got it personally from Duchamp. Picabia’s “Intervention of a Woman by Means of a Machine” from 1915 is estimated between €700,000 and €1 million.
At auction, there will be a set of 16 works by Man Rey, including a series of images “Rotating doors”. Brand started the collection after an accidental encounter with Duchamp in 1955, during a chess tournament in the Manhattan Park, which the French artist liked.
Mona Lisa With Mustache
