Self Portrait Mona Lisa, 1973 by Salvador Dali

Self Portrait Mona Lisa, 1973 by Salvador Dali
Self Portrait Mona Lisa, 1973 by Salvador Dali

Phillipe Halsman originally created the photomontage, titled Dali Mona Lisa, in a collaboration with Dali in 1954. The image was published the same year in Dali's Moustache, another collaboration featuring some thirty-six photos of the artist and his famous mustache. This photomontage was undoubtedly influenced by Duchamp's own 1919 Dadist parody of the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci, the assisted ready-made L.H.O.O.Q. Dali went on to write about Duchamp's "desecration" of Leonardo's work in the article "Why they attack the Mona Lisa" of 1963, discussing it as an act of Freudian rebellion against and vandalization of traditional female idealization.