It turns out that Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa once visited America!
The painting arrived from France on December 19, 1962, aboard the ocean liner SS France. It was not displayed in New York at the time: it was taken directly from the pier to Washington, D.C.
The first exhibition was held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. A private opening took place there on January 8, 1963, attended by President John F. Kennedy and French Minister of Culture André Malraux. The painting opened to the public the following day, January 9, and remained on display until February 3.
The second exhibition took place at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The painting arrived there on February 4, the opening was held on February 6, and visitors could see it from February 7 through March 4, 1963. It was displayed in the medieval sculpture gallery, mounted against red velvet in front of a Spanish wrought-iron choir screen. Two Marines in dress uniform stood on either side.
The crowds were so large that visitors were not allowed to stop in front of the painting: each person had no more than four or five seconds to look at it.
That same year, 1963, Andy Warhol responded to the frenzy in his own way. He took a reproduction of the Mona Lisa from a brochure published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the exhibition and screen-printed it thirty times on a single canvas. The work is called Thirty Are Better Than One. The title referred to the crowds lining Fifth Avenue and the fact that visitors were given only four seconds to see the painting, while Warhol allowed viewers to look at it for as long as they wanted — and in thirty copies at once.
Around the same time, he made several other versions, including Colored Mona Lisa, in which the portrait is printed in different colors. For Warhol, the Mona Lisa joined Marilyn Monroe and Campbell’s soup cans as an image that everyone had seen so many times that it stopped being simply a painting and became a brand. A spread from that same museum brochure is preserved at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.
Interestingly, the idea for the tour came from Jacqueline Kennedy. The First Lady spoke French and was friends with French Minister of Culture André Malraux, who promised to lend her the Mona Lisa.
Almost a decade later, the painting made another tour, its last one: in 1974, it was exhibited in Tokyo and then taken to Moscow.
Moscow happened almost by chance. Irina Antonova, director of the Pushkin Museum, learned that the painting would be flying over Moscow on its way back and, through the Ministry of Culture, managed to arrange an exhibition. The painting was shown in the Soviet Union, which was an extraordinary event in itself during the Cold War. Reports say that 300,000 people saw it, with some visitors standing in line for seven or eight hours. Other sources credit Leonid Brezhnev rather than Antonova with requesting the exhibition.
Since then, the Louvre has not lent the painting even once and says it will not do so again.
