The Birth of Conceptual Art

Painted in late 1915 or early 1916, Morée predates Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain and radically reshapes our understanding of modern art’s origins. Long before Fountain shocked the New York avant-garde in 1917, Duchamp and his closest peers had already begun experimenting with coded authorship, sabotage, and conceptual strategies. Morée is the earliest known work to embody these ideas: its scraped signature, punctuating dots, theatrical staging, and corrosive drips create a self-documenting puzzle that reveals its own making.

Far from a decorative painting, Morée functions as an encrypted manifesto — the true moment where Dada and conceptual art are born. Fountain was not the beginning, but the public unveiling of a conceptual revolution already underway, one that Morée silently initiated from the shadows.