The Sad Mona Project

This is an art project.

The Sad Mona Project is a series of reproductions of well known painted portraits (and sometimes photographs) made up with sad clown makeup. They are posted on Instagram, @sketch_finish.

The work was conceived in response to an event on January 28, 2024, when an activist group called Riposte Alimentaire staged an action in the Louvre museum in Paris, throwing  pumpkin soup at the Mona Lisa. The activists then made a statement about food insecurity, calling for a universal allowance for food in France. Here is a brief report on the BBC. Here is the website of the group. Here is a  14 sec. clip of the protest action on YouTube.

My immediate reaction was of sadness. How sad to see an artwork that is so revered, now so disrespected. Poor Leonardo, imagine how mystifying the modern world would seem to him! Or Mona, imagine how she might feel!

Of course, such thoughts would not occur to the activists, blinded by their cause to the fact that they are assaulting not just a priceless, historical treasure but a picture of a woman no less.

So I made Mona sad. And then, I imagined the scandal of Mona’s defacing spreading through the artworld, as if all artists and artworks were talking to each other across time and place. The next day I made Van Gogh’s self-portrait sad. And then Edvard Munch’s famous Scream. And so on…

The Mona Lisa has suffered her share of trials and tribulations. She was kidnapped in 1911 (and returned two years later) and attacked on two separate occasions in 1956. One vandal threw acid, the other a rock. – Carnegie Museums of Pittsburg

Protests actions like that get headlines globally. They trade on the fame of the work. The last such public defacing protest I recall involved mashed potatoes and a Monet painting in Potsdam, Germany. I wrote about that here.

At the time of this writing, there are over 50 sad Monas. They are posted on Instagram @sketch_finish. Here are the first 15 after the original Mona.