The NY Dada Timeline
To decode Morée, it is important to understand
the six traits that define a NY Dada artwork.
This page breaks them down one by one. We call them “coded gestures”—not because they’re secret,
but because they act like signals: recurring tactics used to disrupt meaning, authorship, function, and beauty.
Each gesture first appeared in Morée—subtle in form, quietly radical.
What follows is a list of later works that echo them, sometimes with sharper intent.
They may look different, but the gestures are the same.
SIX CODED GESTURES, ONE ORIGIN
The tabs below explore the foundations of NY Dada.
Each quietly introduced in Morée, before New York called it Dada.
Author/Title Punning
Definition—The manipulation, withholding, or playful disguise of authorship through pseudonyms, canceled signatures, or coded identity.
Morée: —The artist signs the painting with a pseudonym, Morée—legible as “she who has died”—and then partially scrapes it away. More than concealment, it is a staged performance of disappearance: the earliest known act of pseudonymous misdirection, predating even Duchamp’s “R. Mutt” signature.
Subversion of Glamour
Definition —Aesthetic beauty, luxury, or ornament is exaggerated, inverted, or mocked—often appearing as empty or synthetic.
Morée: —The pearls—once emblems of refinement and bourgeois taste—are stripped of all glamour. Suspended in an acidic, deteriorating wash, they hover just above a consuming wave, as if beauty itself were moments from drowning.
Other Examples: —Jeanne Marie Bourgeois, L.H.O.O.Q.,
Rrose Sélavy, Da-Dandy, Belle Haleine
Drips as Sabotage
Definition —Drips or stains are not expressive but corrosive. They mar or undermine an image’s authority or meaning.
Morée: —Veil-like vertical drips are layered across the surface, disrupting clarity and elegance. These are not expressive flourishes—they actively degrade the image, mimicking corrosion or accidental damage. The drips call attention to the medium’s instability, pushing paint beyond depiction into dissolution. In this way, they seem to attack both the image and the idea of image-making itself.
Other Examples: —Jeanne Marie Bourgeois, Da-Dandy,
La Sainte Vierge, Belle Haleine
Denial of Function
Definition —A useful object is made deliberately useless. Its intended function is interrupted, reversed, or perverted.
Morée: —The painting begins as a decorative image: glossy pearls arranged with theatrical elegance on a standardized board. But this surface is deliberately sabotaged. Acidic drips cut through the composition, the background is eroded, and even the signature is abraded. What might have functioned as ornament instead cancels its own appeal, transforming decoration into an act of refusal.
Other Examples: —Apolinére Enameled, Fountain, God, Fresh Widow, Cadeau/Gift
Surface Disruption
Definition —The integrity of the image surface is physically or conceptually violated. Cuts, intrusions, or insertions interrupt pictorial unity.
Morée: —There is visible scraping, and abrasion of the signature as well as partial removal of a topmost paint layer. These acts violate the image’s continuity. Paint is not used to depict but to interfere—to break the surface as a stable field.
Other Examples: —Jeanne Marie Bourgeois; Tu m’,
Tableau RastaDada, CacoDylate Eye, De Portraits
Artistic Citation
Definition —An existing image, style, or motif is quoted or repurposed—used as conceptual material within a new context.
Morée: —The pearls seem to reference Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 and Nude Descending No. 3, where their form was singled out for refinement—visually amplified into rhythmic flourish. In Morée, they are quoted but now in collapse: no longer a symbol of motion or modernity, but of arrested decay, as if Duchamp were turning his own vocabulary against itself.
Other Examples: —Jeanne Marie Bourgeois, God, Tu m’. L.H.O.O.Q., Da-Dandy, Cacodylate Eye, De Portraits,
Belle Haleine
MORÉE IS THE STARTING POINT
Examples of the Six Coded Gestures, 1916–1921
Every work on this list came later—
but each one echoes something first seen in Morée.
Together, they form a trail of ideas that
shaped the core of New York Dada.
