Stealing the Mona Lisa: How an Art Heist Created an Icon and Broke the Avant-Garde
If you walked into the Louvre in 1911 and asked to see the most famous painting on view, a guard wouldn’t have pointed you in the direction of the Mona Lisa, as they would now. Instead, they would direct you to a painting like Delacroix’s The Raft of the Medusa or Veronese’s The Wedding at Cana. The Mona Lisa was a fine portrait, certainly prized enough by the museum to gift it one of their new glass frames. But it wasn’t the star we know it to be today.
It wasn’t that da Vinci or his Mona Lisa were unknown—far from it. Since her creation in the early 1500s, she had been revered and admired by numerous members of the French court, with a prized place in Versailles. She had also captured the attention of Napoleon Bonaparte, who not only helped create the Louvre as we know it today, but who took her to live in his bedroom in the Tuileries Palace. But for as grand as these homes were, they were not exactly conducive to allowing the public to see, let alone know or care much about, the painting. Even once she again hung in the Louvre**,** she was compelling for her enigmatic nature, but didn’t yet hold the singular place in the cultural conscious that she does today.
That started to change in the early 20th century, thanks to many of the same forces that were changing the rest of the art world. Photography was allowing the public to see the painting and familiarize themselves with it, even if it wasn’t in person. Plus, the new money flowing out of the pockets of the wealthy Americans like JP Morgan and Andrew Carnegie led to a growing market for art forgeries, making the Old Masters such as the Mona Lisa feel more prized and valuable.
Paris at that time was also the undisputed center of the art world, a thriving city of culture, filled with an electric energy. But this wasn’t the case because the artists that flocked to Paris were keeping up with convention. On the contrary, Paris was home to the heart of the avant-garde, taking in everyone from the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky to the Italian painter Amadeo Modigliani. Perhaps the most famous of these creatives were the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso and his friend, the Polish poet Guillaume Apollinaire.
No one mocked the conventions of the old grade more loudly than the new avant-garde. In fact, Apollinaire once signed a manifesto declaring that the Louvre should be burned down entirely, its contents little more than an anchor dragging art into irrelevance.
And yet, when an unknown thief slipped into the Louvre and stole the Mona Lisa right off the wall, everything changed. Because suddenly, a painting that had once been respected, if not exactly adored, was missing. And nobody loves something as much as when they think they’ve lost it forever.
The press turned the theft into a sensation. Many publications speculated that international relations may have played a role, wondering out loud if the French government had faked the theft to divert attention from the growing tensions between Germany and France. Others wondered if a wealthy American magnate had paid to have the painting stolen, so that he could enjoy it for himself. ****Overnight, the Mona Lisa because a cultural martyr, a symbol of France’s cultural prestige. It became priceless—even if the thief had wanted to sell the work, there was no way he could now.
And the very people who had laughed in the face of the Mona Lisa, dismissing her and her kind as stale and irrelevant, would find themselves at the heart of her story.
Excerpt from the forthcoming podcast, Verso.