An Anonymously Signed
Early Dada Painting
A Painting With Hidden Authority
Morée doesn’t announce itself.
It’s signed anonymously. It doesn’t explain itself. It doesn’t need to.
Its methods are too deliberate—its attack too precise—to be guessed.
Whoever made Morée didn’t need to shout.
They understood the Dada playbook—and demonstrated it with precision.
Have You Ever Seen a Painting Cry?
Morée is a unique creation.
Its surface weeps downward—gravity dragging beauty into collapse.
The drips aren’t painted; they’re trails—
trails not of expression, but erosion.
Not gesture, but undoing.
In 1916, no one was painting like this.
But someone made a painting cry—
for the first, and possibly the only, time.
- Drip as Sabotage
The first—and possibly the only—painting to use erosive drips not as gesture, but as sabotage…
- Visual Dada
The earliest painting to fully enact Dada’s tactics in image and surface…
- Defining Dada
The hidden inspiration behind key works by Picabia, Duchamp, and later Jasper Johns…
In 1916 or early 1917
Someone Painted Morée.
Before Dada had fully named itself—before sabotage was a technique—
Morée may have been the first to turn its own erosion into sabotage.
Morée anticipated several strategies that would soon define Dada:
• Authorial Punning
• Parody of Glamour
• Drips as Sabotage
• Function Denied
• Surface Rupture
Morée didn’t adopt those tools—it implemented them.
Before Dada even knew what game it was playing.
From New York to Berlin—A Subversive Current
By 1919, the visual language of Morée had crossed the Atlantic.
In Hannah Höch’s Da-Dandy, its motifs return: pearls parodied as performative bourgeois glamour, destabilized surfaces, and a
backdrop echoing the water-worn Veil Water effect.
This wasn’t drift—it was transmission.
Morée had already turned ornament into parody and
image into attack.
Whether through photographs, publications, or quiet contact,
the tactics seeded in Morée appear in some of Berlin’s most
radical Dada experiments. What started as surface sabotage
became a weapon—and others picked it up.