21 August brings together punk rock and one of the most audacious art thefts in history.
On 21 August 1952, Joe Strummer was born in Ankara, Turkey. He would go on to become the frontman of The Clash, one of the defining bands of the British punk movement.
Exactly 41 years earlier, on 21 August 1911, another rebellious act was taking place — although this one happened at the Louvre in Paris.
That morning, Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian handyman who had previously worked at the museum, walked out of the Louvre with Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. He had removed the painting from its frame and concealed it beneath his clothing. The theft transformed an already important Renaissance painting into an international celebrity.
And that’s where our Link Salad hits The Clash.
In 1980, The Clash released Bankrobber, written by Joe Strummer and Mick Jones. Its famous opening tells us that the narrator’s father was a bank robber — but one who “never hurt nobody.”
So, with a little Link Salad licence:
Daddy was a gallery robber. He never hurt nobody.
Peruggia certainly wasn’t a conventional bank robber. He claimed that his motivation was patriotic: he believed the Mona Lisa belonged in Italy and should be returned there. He kept the painting hidden for more than two years before attempting to sell it to an art dealer in Florence in 1913.
The Mona Lisa was recovered, exhibited triumphantly in Italy and eventually returned to the Louvre.
Joe Strummer, meanwhile, spent his career challenging authority in a rather different way — with a guitar rather than a stolen Leonardo.
Two rebels. Two very different kinds of cultural history. One date.
21 August: Joe Strummer’s birthday and the day the Mona Lisa disappeared from the Louvre.
🎸 🖼️