Claim Summary: Morée, the Origins of Dada Drip Technique, and New Interpretations of Various Artworks

By Tom Hodgkinson

angelcloud.org
Date: June 2025

This summary outlines a set of claims surrounding the painting Morée, a newly surfaced 1910s work that appears to prefigure several techniques and motifs later echoed in Dada and Neo-Dada art. These findings suggest that Morée may represent a missing link in Duchamp’s conceptual practice—obscured for decades and only now surfacing through close visual and technical analysis.

1. Discovery of Morée

I am the current owner of a painting titled Morée, likely created in late 1916 or early 1917. The painting uses a subtractive “drip” technique likely exploiting the Marangoni effect, combining staged erosion, alcohol-based ink removal, and embedded pearl motifs. This process was virtually unknown in art-making at the time.

2. Earliest Use of Drip as Conceptual Device in Dada

Based on technical analysis and contextual comparison, I argue that Morée represents the earliest known instance in which drips were used not decoratively but conceptually—as an agent of erosion, sabotage, and critique within the Dada movement.

This precedes better-known drip applications by Picabia and Pollock and Neo-Dada artists by decades.

3. Connection to Duchamp, Picabia, Man Ray, and Höch,

I have identified strong visual and conceptual echoes of and planted references of Morée in:

Francis Picabia’s Jeanne Marie Bourgeois (1917)
Hannah Höch’s Da-Dandy (1919)
Duchamp and Man Ray’s Belle Haleine (1921)
Man Ray’s Gift (1921)

Each incorporates elements—such as pearls and veiling via subtractive processes—that appear to echo techniques pioneered in Morée.

4. Neo-Dada Echoes: Jasper Johns and a Missing Duchamp Painting

Recent visual analysis suggests that Jasper Johns’ 1964 According to What may contain symbolic references to a lost early Dada painting, Morée—including a silhouette of Duchamp, paired with drip motifs and visual metaphors of absence. These may
function as coded acknowledgments of a painting known (or at least intuited) by Johns.

On the hinged canvas of According to What, Duchamp’s cut-out profile appears suspended by a string—evoking a tag or
label that might be read as identifying a missing work. Just to its left, an ink blot and trailing drip closely resemble
Francis Picabia’s La Sainte Vierge.

While Johns associates drips with Duchamp elsewhere, this particular reference to Picabia may be a deliberate visual correction: suggesting that the conceptual use of the dada-drip originated not with himself or with Picabia, but with Duchamp.

The title—According to What—reads like a prompt. One interpretation: According to what principle should this hinged
panel be closed? Two possible answers emerge:

Upon Duchamp’s death.
Or when Morée is found.

Other elements support the reading. The three-dimensional cast legs seated in a chair (upper left) may represent Duchamp himself.
A related work from the same year—Watchman—features a similar sculptural figure, again seated, again with drips of paint behind, this time using violet paint, the dominant color in Morée.

In 1967, Johns revisited Watchman as a lithograph. This time, the chair and legs are gone—replaced by a void. Whether
symbolic or elegiac, the absence is striking. Though dated 1967, the print was not publicly released until early 1969—
shortly after Duchamp’s death.