Picabia’s Earliest Visual Dada Masterwork

Jeanne Marie Bourgeois (also known as A portrait of Mistinguett) is the first known Dada painting—after Morée—to encode any of the Coded Gestures.
Its drips are not expressive but corrosive, interrupting the figure and scarring the surface with intentional sabotage. These aren’t accidents—they’re statements.

Picabia doesn’t merely parody femininity—he parodies glamour itself. The figure appears elegant at first glance, but the sheen is poisoned: stained, scraped, and collapsed from within. Even his own authorship is negated: he runs his fingers
through the long central drip, an almost physical cancellation of his own presence.

Unlike later Dada citations of Morée, Jeanne Marie Bourgeois was likely created
while the painting (or a photograph of it) was still accessible. It doesn’t simply
echo Morée—it engages with it, absorbing its language and mutating it into something public.

Where Morée was a private experiment, Jeanne Marie Bourgeois is a transmission. A reply.