With his work "L.H.O.O.Q." from 1919, Marcel Duchamp made a funny iconoclastic gesture. He painted a moustache over a lithographic reproduction of the Mona Lisa. The title is a pun. If you read out the letters in French, it reads: "Elle a chaud au cul“, which roughly translates as "Her bottom is hot". Duchamp thus increases the blasphemy of his painterly gesture with a sexual note. Duchamp's works are filled with puns and little enigmatic details such as these, and there are many writers who have commented on this. It is very entertaining.

Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp was a French chess player and renowned artist. In 1919, he scandalized Paris and the international chess world by drawing a moustache and goatee to a reproduction of the Mona Lisa. He called it L.H.O.O.Q. In French, the letters sound like "elle a chand au cul." meaning "she has a hot rear end."

1) "In the year 1919 on the 400th anniversary of Leonardo’s death, Duchamp took a reproduction of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa added in pencil a moustache and gave it the title pronounced in French: Elle a chaud au cul (She has a hot arse). …In reference to the Mona Lisa I also added a sentence or initials on the bottom of that reproduction - L.H.O.O.Q. A loose translation of them would be ‘there is fire down below. (Artur Schwartz, The Complete work of Marcel Duchamp, Thames & Hudson, pp. 476-77) Duchamp said that by drawing moustache and beard to Mona Lisa, she became a man: The curious thing about that moustache and goatee is that when you look at it the Mona Lisa becomes a man. It is not a woman disguised as a man, it is a real man, and that was my discovery without realizing it at that time. (Artur Schwartz, The Complete work of Marcel Duchamp, Thames & Hudson, pp. 476-477) Marchel Duchamp later wrote that the only reason he draw her moustache was to desacralize her. But maybe Duchamp didn't tell us everything and he revealed only the first layer of the image. Rhonda Roland Shearer, a New York sculptor thinks that L.H.O.O.Q. is Duchamp's self portrait. She thought that original was a lithography made by a superimposition of Mona Lisa and Duchamp's portrait." Source and further information: http://www.aiwaz.net/panopticon/lhooq-readymade/gi1597c234 2) "Duchamp's infamous L.H.O.O.Q. of 1919--his supposedly simple "desecration" of festooning an image of the Mona Lisa with a moustache, a beard, and a salacious title (the letters spoken in French sound like the sentence "She has a hot ass")--actually represents Duchamp's more subtle and complex manipulation of creating his own lithographic reproduction by making a composite of his face with Leonardo's La Giaconda. (In so doing, we presume, Duchamp wished to expose the foibles of art critics and historians by showing that he could so alter their most famous icon, and they would not notice so long as he distracted them by an outrageous graffito and a plausible Dada claim for why he had done so). " Source and further information: http://www.duchamp.org/symposium/article1letter.html Further information: http://docs.law.gwu.edu/facweb/claw/Lhooq0.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lhooq