When a Virgin was the hardest thing a painter could do
For roughly five hundred years, a “Holy Virgin” was the summit of a painter’s ambition. Raphael, Murillo, Bouguereau: a Madonna was where reverence for the most sacred subject and total mastery of the hand were supposed to meet, the picture by which a painter proved he could do everything. Even Cubism, the movement Picabia himself had just walked out of, still prized composition, the considered mark, the discipline of the surface. Across all of it, two things were never in question: the picture depicted something, and a skilled hand made it.
Both skill and subject, gone in one gesture
La Sainte Vierge dethrones both of those at once. A flick of the wrist, an accident, a chance stain, is titled as a sacred image, and that is the entire picture. What is on the page is no longer depiction (it depicts nothing) and no longer even drawing (no hand drew the shape). The content of the work is the gesture and the chance of the ink, plus the provocation of the name. Authorship has shrunk to a single choice and a caption. The painter’s hand, the thing the whole tradition was built to celebrate, has been fired.
That sounds like pure destruction, and it partly is. But the strange thing about this little blot is how much of the next forty years of art is hiding inside it. Make chance and gesture the actual content of a work, and you are a step from the automatic drawing the Surrealists would make into a method within a few years, and from art informel and tachisme, the post-war European painting built entirely out of the blot and the smear (the French tache means, precisely, “stain”: Picabia’s medium here is literally their name). Let the chance-made mark be the work itself, and you are on the road to gestural abstraction and the poured, dripped skeins of Action Painting a generation later. And let the title do the work instead of the hand, naming as the creative act, and you are inside the lineage that runs through Duchamp toward Conceptual art, where the idea is the art and the object is almost an afterthought.
None of that is a claim that Picabia sat down in 1920 and planned the next half-century. He made a one-off insult for a magazine. But the insult happened to put a finger on something real, that a mark made by chance and named by the artist could carry as much weight as a labored picture, and that idea turned out to have an enormous future. The smallest work in this whole sequence is one of the most far-reaching.