View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Iowa Research Online Dada/Surrealism ISSN 0084-9537 No. 22 DOI: 10.17077/0084-9537.1321 Dada, War and Peace Article 5 The Blood of France: Joan of Arc and Francis Picabia's La Sainte- Vierge Simon Marginson University of York accessible Copyright © 2018 Simon Marginson Recommended Citation Marginson, Simon. "The Blood of France: Joan of Arc and Francis Picabia's La Sainte-Vierge." Dada/ Surrealism 22 (2018): n. pag. Web. Available at: https://doi.org/10.17077/0084-9537.1321 Hosted by Iowa Research Online This Theme Essay is brought to you for free and open access by Iowa Research Online. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dada/Surrealism by an authorized administrator of Iowa Research Online. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. The Blood of France: Joan of Arc and Francis Picabia’s La Sainte-Vierge Simon Marginson Francis Picabia’s blasphemously titled drawing La Sainte-Vierge first appeared in the twelfth issue of his journal 391 (fig. 1). Originally published in May 1920, Picabia’s iconoclastic gesture is now canonical. An icon in its own right, La Sainte-Vierge continues to serve as the ubiquitous visual shorthand for Dada’s nihilistic, anti-art tendencies within general accounts of modernism, despite the existence of a large body of specialist literature that expands the significance of the drawing well beyond these persistent clichés. Indeed, La Sainte-Vierge has been subject to such wide- ranging interpretations that George Baker has complained that it is in danger of becoming the Rorschach blot of art history (38).