A drop of ink, a caption, a signature

There is very little making here, and that is the point. The work is India ink (a dense black drawing ink, called encre de Chine in French) let fall onto a sheet of gray paper, plus a few words and a signature added in blue-violet ink. The blot was applied and the ink was allowed to run by chance, gravity finishing the picture the artist started. That is essentially the whole technique.

Exactly how the ink got onto the page is a question popular accounts answer more confidently than they should. You will often read that Picabia flung or threw the ink, hurled it dramatically across the studio. The careful scholarly reading is quieter: the blot was most likely placed with an ink dropper or pipette from the bottle and then let run. Either way the crucial fact is the same: the shape of the mark was handed over to chance rather than chosen by a skilled hand. Whether he flung it or dripped it, he did not drawit. The dramatic “flung across the room” version is at arm’s length here, because the sources do not actually support it.

Then he did the two small things that turn an accident into a work of art. He lettered the title across the top, “LA SAINTE VIERGE,” and he signed his namebelow. The medium line at the Centre Pompidou records all of it together: India ink, graphite pencil, and ink on paper. So it is not, strictly, “just an ink splatter,” even though that is how it is usually described. The lettering and the signature are part of the work, and they carry the entire blasphemy. The blot alone is nothing; the blot plus the words is the joke.

The image here is the original drawing, the actual blot-on-gray-paper now held by the Centre Pompidou. When the same image was printed in 391 no. 12, the magazine reproduced it cropped and mirror-reversed, flipped left-for-right like a reflection, so the drips run in opposite directions in the two versions: the way the ink trails off the blot in the drawing is the reverse of the way it trails off in the printed plate. That flip is the cleanest way to tell, at a glance, whether you are looking at the drawing or the magazine print.