How did Marcel Duchamp alter a reproduction of the Mona Lisa in L.H.O.O.Q.?

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Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci, oil painting showing a woman with a slight smile and folded hands, seated before a distant, hazy landscape. — Mona Lisa *Mona Lisa*, oil on wood panel by Leonardo da Vinci, 1503–19; in the Louvre, Paris.

In his 1919 work L.H.O.O.Q., Marcel Duchamp altered a postcard reproduction of the Mona Lisa by drawing a mustache and a goatee on the subject's face.1

This act of irreverent defacement was a hallmark of the Dadaists, who used such gestures to reject traditional art. They viewed the art of the past as complicit in the societal failures that led to the horrors of the First World War.1