Apart from cer­tain stretch­es of absence, Leonar­do’s Mona Lisa has been on dis­play at the Lou­vre for 228 years and count­ing. Though cre­at­ed by an Ital­ian in Italy, the paint­ing has long since been a part of French cul­ture. At some point, the rev­er­ence for La Joconde, as the Mona Lisa is local­ly known, reached such an inten­si­ty as to inspire the label Jocondisme. For Mar­cel Duchamp, it all seems to have been a bit much. In 1919, he bought a post­card bear­ing the image of that most famous of all paint­ings, drew a mus­tache and goa­tee on it, and dubbed the result­ing “art­work” L.H.O.O.Q., whose French pro­nun­ci­a­tion “Elle a chaud au cul” trans­lates to — as Duchamp mod­est­ly put it — “There is fire down below.”

A cen­tu­ry ago, this was a high­ly irrev­er­ent, even blas­phe­mous act, but also just what one might expect from the man who, a cou­ple years ear­li­er, signed a uri­nal and put it on dis­play in a gallery. Like the much-scru­ti­nized Foun­tain, L.H.O.O.Q. was one of Ducham­p’s “ready­mades,” or artis­tic provo­ca­tions exe­cut­ed by mod­i­fy­ing and re-con­tex­tu­al­iz­ing found objects.

Nei­ther was sin­gu­lar: just as Duchamp signed mul­ti­ple uri­nals, he also drew (or did­n’t draw) facial hair on mul­ti­ple Mona Lisa post­cards. In one instance, he even gave the okay to his fel­low artist Fran­cis Picabia to make one for pub­li­ca­tion in his mag­a­zine in New York as, nev­er­the­less, “par Mar­cel Duchamp” — though it lacked a goa­tee, an omis­sion the artist cor­rect­ed in his own hand some twen­ty years lat­er.

In the 1956 inter­view just above, Duchamp describes L.H.O.O.Q. as a part of his “Dada peri­od” (and, with char­ac­ter­is­tic mod­esty, “a great icon­o­clas­tic ges­ture on my part”). He also brings out a fake check — belong­ing to “no bank at all” — that he cre­at­ed to use at the den­tist (who accept­ed it); and a sys­tem designed to “break the bank at Monte Car­lo” (which stub­born­ly remained unbro­ken). “I believe that art is the only form of activ­i­ty in which man, as a man, shows him­self to be a true indi­vid­ual, and is capa­ble of going beyond the ani­mal state,” he declares. With his col­li­sion of Jocondisme and Dada, among the oth­er unlike­ly jux­ta­po­si­tions he engi­neered, he showed him­self to be the pre­mier prankster of ear­ly twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry art — and one whose pranks tran­scend­ed amuse­ment to inspire a schol­ar­ly indus­try that per­sists even today.

Relat­ed con­tent:

What Makes the Mona Lisa a Great Paint­ing: A Deep Dive

How Did the Mona Lisa Become the World’s Most Famous Paint­ing?: It’s Not What You Think

The Mar­cel Duchamp Research Por­tal Opens, Mak­ing Avail­able 18,000 Doc­u­ments and 50,000 Images Relat­ed to the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Artist

How Mar­cel Duchamp Signed a Uri­nal in 1917 & Rede­fined Art

When Bri­an Eno & Oth­er Artists Peed in Mar­cel Duchamp’s Famous Uri­nal

Sal­vador Dalí Reveals the Secrets of His Trade­mark Mous­tache (1954)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

In 2003, a Sal­vador Dalí draw­ing was stolen from Rik­ers Island, one of the most for­mi­da­ble pris­ons in the Unit­ed States. That the inci­dent has nev­er been used as the basis for a major motion pic­ture seems inex­plic­a­ble, at least until you learn the details. A screen­writer would have to adapt it as not a stan­dard heist movie but a com­e­dy of errors, begin­ning with the very con­cep­tion of the crime. It seems that a few Rik­ers guards con­spired sur­rep­ti­tious­ly to replace the art­work, which hung on a lob­by wall, with a fake. Unfor­tu­nate­ly for them, they made a less-than-con­vinc­ing replace­ment, and even if it had been detail-per­fect, how did they expect to sell a unique work whose crim­i­nal prove­nance would be so obvi­ous?

Yet the job was, in some sense, a suc­cess, in that the draw­ing was nev­er actu­al­ly found. Dalí cre­at­ed it in 1965, when he was invit­ed by Depart­ment of Cor­rec­tion Com­mis­sion­er Anna Moscowitz Kross to meet with Rik­ers Island’s inmates. “Kross, the first female com­mis­sion­er of the jail sys­tem, believed in reha­bil­i­tat­ing pris­on­ers with art, includ­ing paint­ing ses­sions and the­ater pro­duc­tions,” writes James Fanel­li, telling the sto­ry in Esquire. As for the artist, “as long as the city’s news­pa­pers would be there to cap­ture his mag­nan­i­mous act, he was game” — but in the event, a 101-degree fever kept him from get­ting on the fer­ry to the prison that day. Instead, he dashed off an image of Christ on the cross (not an unfa­mil­iar sub­ject for him) and sent it in his stead.

“For near­ly two decades, it hung in the pris­on­ers’ mess hall,” writes Fanel­li. “In 1981, after an inmate lobbed a cof­fee cup at the paint­ing, break­ing its glass cas­ing and leav­ing a stain, the Dalí was tak­en down.” It then went from apprais­er to gallery to stor­age to the trash bin, from which it was saved by a guard. By 2003, it had end­ed up in the lob­by of one of the ten jails that con­sti­tute the Rik­ers Island com­plex, hung by the Pep­si machine. That no one paid the work much mind, and more so that it has been appraised at one mil­lion dol­lars, was clear­ly not lost on the employ­ee who mas­ter­mind­ed the heist. Yet though they man­aged to catch his accom­plices, the inves­ti­ga­tors were nev­er able legal­ly to deter­mine who that mas­ter­mind was.

Read­ers of Fanel­li’s sto­ry, or view­ers of the Inside Edi­tion video at the top of the post, may well find them­selves sus­pect­ing a par­tic­u­lar cor­rec­tions offer, who suc­cess­ful­ly main­tained his inno­cence despite being named by all his col­leagues who did get con­vic­tions. Any drama­ti­za­tion of the Rik­ers Island Dalí heist would have to make its own deter­mi­na­tion about whether he or some­one else was real­ly the ring­leader, and it might even have to make a guess as to the ulti­mate fate of the stolen draw­ing itself. One isn’t entire­ly dis­pleased to imag­ine it hang­ing today in a hid­den room in the out­er-bor­ough home of some retired prison guard: made in haste and with scant inspi­ra­tion, dam­aged by cof­fee and poor stor­age con­di­tions, and pos­si­bly ripped apart and put back togeth­er again, but a Dalí nonethe­less.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Great­est Art Heist in His­to­ry: How the Mona Lisa Was Stolen from the Lou­vre (1911)

How Art Gets Stolen: What Hap­pened to Egon Schiele’s Paint­ing Boats Mir­rored in the Water After Its Theft by the Nazis

How Jan van Eyck’s Mas­ter­piece, the Ghent Altar­piece, Became the Most Stolen Work of Art in His­to­ry

When Ger­man Per­for­mance Artist Ulay Stole Hitler’s Favorite Paint­ing & Hung it in the Liv­ing Room of a Turk­ish Immi­grant Fam­i­ly (1976)

Take a Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty Tour of the World’s Stolen Art

Mod­ern Art Was Used As a Tor­ture Tech­nique in Prison Cells Dur­ing the Span­ish Civ­il War

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Few mod­ern writ­ers so remind me of the famous Vir­ginia Woolf quote about fic­tion as a “spi­der’s web” more than Argen­tine fab­u­list Jorge Luis Borges. But the life to which Borges attach­es his labyrinths is a librar­i­an’s life; the strands that anchor his fic­tions are the obscure schol­ar­ly ref­er­ences he weaves through­out his text. Borges brings this ten­den­cy to whim­si­cal employ in his non­fic­tion Book of Imag­i­nary Beings, a het­ero­ge­neous com­pendi­um of crea­tures from ancient folk­tale, myth, and demonolo­gy around the world.

Borges him­self some­times remarks on how these ancient sto­ries can float too far away from rati­o­ci­na­tion. The “absurd hypothe­ses” regard­ing the myth­i­cal Greek Chimera, for exam­ple, “are proof” that the ridicu­lous beast “was begin­ning to bore peo­ple…. A vain or fool­ish fan­cy is the def­i­n­i­tion of Chimera that we now find in dic­tio­nar­ies.” Of  what he calls “Jew­ish Demons,” a cat­e­go­ry too numer­ous to parse, he writes, “a cen­sus of its pop­u­la­tion left the bounds of arith­metic far behind.

Through­out the cen­turies, Egypt, Baby­lo­nia, and Per­sia all enriched this teem­ing mid­dle world.” Although a less­er field than angelol­o­gy, the influ­ence of this fas­ci­nat­ing­ly diverse canon only broad­ened over time.

“The natives record­ed in the Tal­mud” soon became “thor­ough­ly inte­grat­ed” with the many demons of Chris­t­ian Europe and the Islam­ic world, form­ing a sprawl­ing hell whose denizens hail from at least three con­ti­nents, and who have mixed freely in alchem­i­cal, astro­log­i­cal, and oth­er occult works since at least the 13th cen­tu­ry and into the present. One exam­ple from the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, a 1902 trea­tise on div­ina­tion from Isfa­han, a city in cen­tral Iran, draws on this ancient thread with a series of water­col­ors added in 1921 that could eas­i­ly be mis­tak­en for illus­tra­tions from the ear­ly Mid­dle Ages.

As the Pub­lic Domain Review notes:

The won­der­ful images draw on Near East­ern demono­log­i­cal tra­di­tions that stretch back mil­len­nia — to the days when the rab­bis of the Baby­lon­ian Tal­mud assert­ed it was a bless­ing demons were invis­i­ble, since, “if the eye would be grant­ed per­mis­sion to see, no crea­ture would be able to stand in the face of the demons that sur­round it.”

The author of the trea­tise, a ram­mal, or sooth­say­er, him­self “attrib­ut­es his knowl­edge to the Bib­li­cal Solomon, who was known for his pow­er over demons and spir­its,” writes Ali Kar­joo-Ravary, now an assis­tant pro­fes­sor of Islam­ic his­to­ry at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty. Pre­dat­ing Islam, “the depic­tion of demons in the Near East… was fre­quent­ly used for mag­i­cal and tal­is­man­ic pur­pos­es,” just as it was by occultists like Aleis­ter Crow­ley at the time these illus­tra­tions were made.

“Not all of the 56 paint­ed illus­tra­tions in the man­u­script depict demon­ic beings,” the Pub­lic Domain Review points out. “Amongst the horned and fork-tongued we also find the archangels Jibrāʾīl (Gabriel) and Mikāʾīl (Michael), as well as the ani­mals — lion, lamb, crab, fish, scor­pi­on — asso­ci­at­ed with the zodi­ac.” But in the main, it’s demon city. What would Borges have made of these fan­tas­tic images? No doubt, had he seen them, and he had seen plen­ty of their like before he lost his sight, he would have been delight­ed.

A blue man with claws, four horns, and a pro­ject­ing red tongue is no less fright­en­ing for the fact that he’s wear­ing a can­dy-striped loin­cloth. In anoth­er image we see a mous­ta­chioed goat man with tuber-nose and pol­ka dot skin mani­a­cal­ly con­coct­ing a less-than-appetis­ing dish. One recur­ring (and wor­ry­ing) theme is demons vis­it­ing sleep­ers in their beds, scenes involv­ing such pleas­ant activ­i­ties as tooth-pulling, eye-goug­ing, and — in one of the most engross­ing illus­tra­tions — a bout of foot-lick­ing (per­formed by a rep­til­ian feline with a shark-toothed tail).

There’s a play­ful Boschi­an qual­i­ty to all of this, but while we tend to see Bosch’s work from our per­spec­tive as absurd, he appar­ent­ly took his bizarre inven­tions absolute­ly seri­ous­ly. So too, we might assume, did the illus­tra­tor here. We might won­der, as Woolf did, about this work as the prod­uct of “suf­fer­ing human beings… attached to gross­ly mate­r­i­al things, like health and mon­ey and the hous­es we live in.” What kinds of ordi­nary, mate­r­i­al con­cerns might have afflict­ed this artist, as he (we pre­sume) imag­ined demons goug­ing the eyes and lick­ing the feet of peo­ple tucked safe­ly in their beds?

See many more of these strange paint­ings at the Pub­lic Domain Review.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2020.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

700 Years of Per­sian Man­u­scripts Now Dig­i­tized and Avail­able Online

2,178 Occult Books Now Dig­i­tized & Put Online, Thanks to the Rit­man Library and Da Vin­ci Code Author Dan Brown

160,000 Pages of Glo­ri­ous Medieval Man­u­scripts Dig­i­tized: Vis­it the Bib­lio­the­ca Philadel­phien­sis

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC.