One image, several objects

Picabia left no documented words about this drawing in particular, no line where he explains the blot. What survives instead is his framing of the whole Dada game, set down in the very same months, and it frames exactly what the blot was for. The clearest statement comes from his Dada Manifesto, printed in 391 no. 12, the issue that carried La Sainte Vierge itself:

“Dada … wants nothing, absolutely nothing, and what it does is to make the public say: ‘We understand nothing, nothing, nothing.’”

“Art is a pharmaceutical product for idiots.”

(Both lines are from the “Dada Manifesto” in 391 no. 12, Paris, March 1920. That last line turns up in English as both “for idiots” and “for imbeciles”; both render the same French original, un produit pharmaceutique pour imbéciles.)

Read the blot back through those two sentences and it stops being a riddle. A work that “wants nothing” and is built to make you “understand nothing” looks exactly like a stain captioned as a Madonna. And if “art is a pharmaceutical product for idiots,” then the right thing to hang in the place where a masterpiece goes is a smear of ink. The drawing is the manifesto, drawn.

A second, separate text from the same month sits beside it, kept separate on purpose. Picabia’s Manifeste Cannibale Dada (“Cannibal Dada Manifesto”) was read aloud by André Breton at the third Dada soirée at the Théâtre de la Maison de l’Œuvre on 27 March 1920, with its flat little litany:

“… like your idols: nothing / like your heroes: nothing / like your artists: nothing / like your religions: nothing.”

(From the Manifeste Cannibale Dada, read at the third Dada soirée, Théâtre de la Maison de l’Œuvre, 27 March 1920, and printed in Dadaphone / Dada no. 7. This one was not printed inside 391no. 12, so it stays separate from the lines above; it belongs to the festival season, not the magazine that carried the drawing.) “Like your religions: nothing” is, in four words, the program of a Holy Virgin made of ink.

There is no single thing called La Sainte Vierge. The image exists as at least three separate objects. There is the drawing on gray paper, the one we have been looking at, now at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. There is the printed plate in 391 no. 12, cropped and mirror-reversed from the drawing, surviving in every copy of the magazine. And there is a separate lithographof the image, on a larger sheet, held by the Yale University Art Gallery. Scholars even argue that Picabia probably made two closely related drawings in a single session on the same paper stock, one perhaps set aside. So “the original” is not a single, simple thing; it depends which object you mean.

The drawing’s own life as an object is short on record. Its ownership before 2008 simply isn’t set down on the museum’s sheet, so no chain is invented for it here. What is documented is the end: in 2008 the Musée National d’Art Moderne, the national museum of modern art at the Centre Pompidou, bought the drawing, with the participation of the German collector Frieder Burda, for its Cabinet d’art graphique (its Graphic Arts Cabinet). It carries the accession number AM 2008-91. No price is published, so none is given here.

The work is in the public domain. It was published in 1920, in 391 no. 12, well before the cutoff that governs old works in the United States, and Picabia died in 1953, so copyright in France and the rest of the life-plus-seventy world expired in 2024. A museum may claim a right in its own photograph of the sheet under European law, but that does not fence off the underlying work. The blot itself belongs to everyone, which is a fitting end for a picture that set out to be worth nothing at all.