Francis Picabia
Jeanne Marie Bourgeois — 1917
A Moment of Recognition
I thought: If Morée isn’t by Picabia—then it seems possible that Picabia may have at least seen this. That possibility really began to gel, especially as I continued to find more parallels.While researching Morée and trying to figure out if any Dada artists had ever painted any kind of drips before, Picabia’s name kept surfacing—but I wasn’t expecting anything, because so far no Dada Artist had created any paintings that looked anything like Morée.
Then I saw Jeanne Marie Bourgeois.
That long drip entering the frame from the right and running all the way to the bottom of the canvas.
I knew that drip. I had seen it—in Morée.
It wasn’t identical, but it did carry the same visual DNA.
That’s when I started asking more questions.
The Black Pool
What was the black pool, the one where the drips seem to originate from? Did that connect to Morée in any way? By now I had a pretty good understanding of the process that was used to create the pigment clearing, drip forming effect that I have decided to call "Veil Water". The "Veil Water" term comes from the English translation of "Eau de Voilette", which is the name of the perfume in Duchamp's Belle Haleine bottle.Understanding this, the black pool seems to be an abstraction of the black ink wash
which is the source of the dark drips in Morée.
The Upper Right Corner
Outlined in red, with three large green horizontal stripes inside, is an area that represents the large cleared (washed out) area in Morée's upper right quadrant. There are also some red drips coming in from the top. The color red, as it turns out will have significance.That significance is explained below.
The Red Squiggly Drip
It started with a question. Why is that long red drip squiggly? Could it represent movement? Actually. I believe it does—movement of pigment. Or more precisely, the repelling of pigment. This effect arises from differences in surface tension between fluids. We are calling this the Veil Water effect but it is more formally known as the Marangoni Effect—the same phenomenon you see when a drop of dish soap repels grease floating on water in a pan.Wherever the color red touches another hue, Picabia leaves a sort of halo around it, simulating the other color skirting away. Of course, this is all abstract. Picabia doesn’t use the actual effect— he paints it symbolically.