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Nat King Cole

MONA LISA

On this day in music history: July 8, 1950 - “Mona Lisa” by Nat King Cole hits #1 on the Billboard Pop Singles chart for 8 weeks, also topping the Rhythm & Blues charts for 4 weeks on September 2, 1950. Written by Ray Evans and Jay Livingston, it is the thirty first single release for the legendary jazz and pop vocalist from Montgomery, AL. The song is featured in the film “Captain Carey, U.S.A.” starring Alan Ladd. Arranged by Nelson Riddle and with instrumental backing by Les Baxter & His Orchestra, Cole’s version of the song is featured on the film’s soundtrack. “Mona Lisa” wins the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1951, quickly becoming a pop standard and is covered by numerous artists over the years, though Cole’s is widely regarded as the definitive version. Nat King Cole’s recording of “Mona Lisa” is inducted into the Grammy Hall Of Fame in 1992.

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Not The Mona Lisa

I used to collect versions of the Mona Lisa from adverts, different cultural appropriations of the picture being put on fridges to a supremely awful Painting By Numbers and methods of reproducing it badly and also repros of the many versions there were in other historic collections and also had numerous bad reproduction in plastic trinket souvenirs that I found in junk shops and the collection was with a view to doing an exhibition loosely about culture and it would have been funny, (hopefully) There is an apocryphal story of course that the one you see in the louvre is not the real thing at all but a reproduction. There is a school of thought that there is one in a Great Britain that is the 'real' one! The Isleworth Mona Lisa is clearly not it!

The Islesworth 'Mona Lisa' attributed now to Leonardo (sic)

Who would know! You can scarcely see it in the Louvre being behind bullet proof glass and usually thronged by people four or five deep.

I also had newspaper clippings about the theft of the painting and the books upon the theft and also basic books written about the one painting [there are hundreds literally]. It would also include Marcel Duchamp's 'L.H.O.O.Q.' a reproduction with an added moustache which started the whole thing as part of my studies under Fred Orton and Gavin Bryars where we started a Duchamp study group at what is now Demontford University.
Duchamp playing with the gender issue ahead of his time questioning how we saw the sexes (he himself was not averse to being shown cross dressing as his alter-ego Rose Selavy)