A stain offered as the Madonna

In front of it, the first thing is an anticlimax, and the anticlimax is the work. The sheet is small, about thirteen inches tall by nine and a half wide (smaller than a sheet of letter paper, a thing you could hold in one hand), and most of it is empty gray ground. In the middle sits a single dark mass: one generous blot of black ink, irregular and organic, with no edge you could call a contour and nothing in it you could call a figure. This is the “image” of the Holy Virgin. There is no Virgin in it. There is a stain.

Off the main mass run the drips, fine trails of ink where the wet ink moved before it dried. They are the literal record of gravity and chance, the trace of a thing that was let happen rather than composed. (These drips run one way here; the 391 plate is flipped.) Nothing about them was designed. They are what the ink did when nobody was steering it.

Across the top runs the caption: LA SAINTE VIERGE, hand-lettered in blue-violet ink, plain and unceremonious. This is the hinge of the whole thing. The blot is just a blot until those three words land on it; the instant they do, the stain becomes “the Blessed Virgin,” and the insult goes off. The work is not in the mark. The work is in the gap between the mark and the name, and the title is what opens that gap.

Below the blot is the signature, “Francis Picabia,” in the same blue-violet ink. It is the only conventional artistic gesture on the page, a painter putting his name to his picture. Except that what he is signing is an accident. The signature claims authorship over a thing chance made, which is precisely the provocation: he is asserting that choosing to drop the ink and naming the result is enough to count as making a work of art.

There is a sharper joke in the choice of subject. The Virgin is, in Catholic doctrine, the one human being conceived without stain, the “immaculate” one (the word literally means “spotless”). Picabia offers her, as her portrait, a literal stain. He gives the spotless Virgin a spot. It is a homage in the exact form of an insult, the meanest possible pun, and once you see it you cannot look at the blot the same way again.

There is one more turn here. The lettered title is writing; the blot is a picture; and the joke sits exactly between them, refusing to be either. The mark is, as one scholar puts it, at once both not writing and not drawing, which is its own small attack on the idea that a work has to commit to being one or the other.

What is not there matters as much as what is. The blot sits in a near-empty field of gray paper: no halo, no blue robe, no setting, no composition, none of the gold and drapery a Madonna had been given for five hundred years. The emptiness is not laziness; it is the argument. Maximum sacred subject, absolute minimum of means. And nothing on the sheet is refined or finished: the lettering is plain, the blot is raw, the drips are left exactly where they fell. The deliberate crudeness is the message, because skill and finish are precisely the things Dada is refusing to give.