A wealthy provocateur and his anarchic little magazine

Francis Picabia (1879–1953) was not a starving artist. He was a wealthy Parisian, the son of a Cuban-Spanish diplomat’s family, who at one point owned more than a hundred cars and burned through several fortunes. He had painted his way through Impressionism and then Cubism (the movement we’ve been following, where a thing is shown from many angles at once), and by 1920 he had left painting-as-usual behind to become something stranger: the chief publisher, financier, and provocateur of Dada.

Dada was the movement that came out of the First World War like a slap. It started in neutral Zurich in 1916, among artists and writers who had watched the most advanced nations in Europe spend four years feeding their young men into machine guns, and who concluded that the whole apparatus of Western reason, progress, good taste, and high culture had just proved itself a sham. Their response was an art of deliberate nonsense and provocation. The name itself, Dada, was reportedly picked at random from a dictionary (it is French baby-talk for a hobby-horse), chosen precisely because it means nothing. If civilization had marched so confidently into the trenches, Dada wanted no part of making sense.

Picabia’s weapon in all this was a magazine. He ran an irregular, deliberately anarchic little review called 391, which he kept going from 1917 to 1924, printing it wherever he happened to be (Barcelona, New York, Zurich, and finally Paris). It traded in lewd drawings, multilingual jokes, scrambled typography, and what one historian calls its “exuberantly nihilistic” attacks on “good taste and sound morals.” The title is 391, with a 3; you will see it misprinted as 291, after an earlier New York magazine, but Picabia’s review was always 391.

Into issue 12 of 391, published in Paris in March 1920, Picabia dropped the small work we are here for. It carried a title that, in Catholic France, you did not say lightly: La Sainte Vierge, “The Holy Virgin,” the Virgin Mary, mother of Christ, the most venerated figure in French religious life and the very emblem of purity. And under that title sat… a stain. A single splatter of black ink. That collision is the entire work: the holiest possible name attached to a smear of ink.

The magazine around it was already doing this kind of thing. 391 was a permanent dare. Picabia used it to mock the art world that had made him rich, to needle the Church, to print insults dressed as poems. La Sainte Viergeis that program in its most compressed form: his smallest, most compressed gesture aimed at the biggest possible target. Chance and the readymade’s naming-move, which Dada had been circling since Arp’s chance collages and Duchamp’s readymades, fired at the one subject guaranteed to give maximum offense. One drop of ink, one sacred caption, and a great deal of trouble.