Photo By Gail

This Mona Lisa (1963) is one of the earliest works for which Andy Warhol employed silk-screening, the printing process that he adopted in 1962 to quickly and easily make multiple copies of preexisting images. Here, he revels in the act of duplication. By replicating a reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting Mona Lisa four times in two different ways, the artist reduces a masterwork epitomizing traditional notions of artistic genius and authorship to a pale shadow of its former self.

Warhol’s Mona Lisa was donated to The Met by his friend Henry Geldzahler, the Museum’s founding curator of contemporary art. One year before Geldzahler made his gift, Warhol released he film Henry Geldzahler, which consists solely of ninety-seven minutes of footage of the curator smoking a cigar.

Photographed in The Met in NYC.