created 2025-05-27, & modified, =this.modified
rel:Dada & Surrealist Art by William S. Rubin
Katherine Dreier commissioned the painting to be hung above her bookshelves, which accounts for its unusual width.
The title, Tu m’, is a French grammatical construction of the informal “you” followed by the direct or indirect object “me_._” The verb is missing, but the presence of the apostrophe indicates that it begins with a vowel. Critics have read the title as an admonition of the medium of painting, supposing it to imply tu m’ennuies (you bore me) or tu m’emmerdes (you annoy me). The painted hand is commonly interpreted as pointing to the artist’s future, i.e., off the canvas to a new medium.
In person, the hand points at the shadow of the protruding bottle brush, which lands on the canvas within the canvas.
Thought
This wasn’t the case when I visited.
