Francis Picabia

Francis Picabia (French: [fʁɑ̃sis pikabja]; born Francis-Marie Martinez de Picabia, 22 January 1879 – 30 November 1953) was a French avant-garde painter, poet and typographist. After experimenting with Impressionism and Pointillism, Picabia became associated with Cubism. His highly abstract planar compositions were colourful and rich in contrasts. He was one of the early major figures of the Dada movement in the United States and in France. He was later briefly associated with Surrealism, but would soon turn his back on the art establishment.^[1]

Biography

Early life

Francis Picabia, 1912, La Source (The Spring), oil on canvas, 249.6 x 249.3 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Exhibited at the 1912 Salon d'Automne, Paris

Francis Picabia was born in Paris of a French mother and a Spanish-Cuban father who was an attaché at the Cuban legation in Paris. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was seven. Some sources would have his father as of aristocratic Spanish descent, whereas others consider him of non-aristocratic Spanish descent, from the region of Galicia.^[2] Financially independent, Picabia studied under Fernand Cormon and others at the École des Arts Decoratifs in the late 1890s.

In 1894, Picabia financed his stamp collection by copying a collection of Spanish paintings that belonged to his father, switching the originals for the copies, without his father's knowledge, and selling the originals. Fernand Cormon took him into his academy at 104 boulevard de Clichy, where Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec had also studied. From the age of 20, he lived by painting; he subsequently inherited money from his mother.

Francis Picabia, 1913, Udnie (Young American Girl, The Dance), oil on canvas, 290 x 300 cm, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

In the beginning of his career, from 1903 to 1908, Picabia was influenced by the Impressionist paintings of Alfred Sisley. Little churches, lanes, roofs of Paris, riverbanks, wash houses, lanes, barges—these were his subject matter. Some however, began to question his sincerity and said he copied Sisley, or that his cathedrals looked like Monet, or that he painted like Signac.^[3] From 1909, he came under the influence of those that would soon be called Cubists and later form the Golden Section (Section d'Or). The same year, he married Gabrielle Buffet.

Around 1911 he joined the Puteaux Group, which met at the studio of Jacques Villon in Puteaux; a commune in the western suburbs of Paris. There he became friends with artist Marcel Duchamp and close friends with Guillaume Apollinaire. Other group members included Albert Gleizes, Roger de La Fresnaye, Fernand Léger and Jean Metzinger.

Proto-Dada

In 1913 Picabia was the only member of the Cubist group to personally attend the Armory Show, and Alfred Stieglitz gave him a solo exhibition at his gallery 291. From 1913 to 1915 Picabia traveled to New York City several times and took active part in the avant-garde movements, introducing Modern art to America. When he landed in New York in June 1915, though it was ostensibly meant to be a simple port of call en route to Cuba to buy molasses for a friend of his—the director of a sugar refinery—the city snapped him up and the stay became prolonged.

(Left) Le saint des saints c'est de moi qu'il s'agit dans ce portrait, 1 July 1915; (center) Portrait d'une jeune fille americaine dans l'état de nudité, 5 July 1915: (right) J'ai vu et c'est de toi qu'il s'agit, De Zayas! De Zayas! Je suis venu sur les rivages du Pont-Euxin, New York, 1915

The magazine 291 devoted an entire issue to him, he met Man Ray, Gabrielle and Duchamp joined him, drugs and alcohol became a problem and his health declined. He suffered from dropsy and tachycardia.^[4] These years can be characterized as Picabia's proto-Dada period, consisting mainly of his portraits mécaniques.

Manifesto

Machine Turn Quickly, 1916-1918, tempera on paper, National Gallery of Art

Later, in 1916, while in Barcelona and within a small circle of refugee artists that included Marie Laurencin, Olga Sacharoff, Robert Delaunay and Sonia Delaunay, he started his well-known Dada periodical 391, modeled on Stieglitz's own periodical. He continued the periodical with the help of Marcel Duchamp in the United States. In Zurich, seeking treatment for depression and suicidal impulses, he had met Tristan Tzara, whose radical ideas thrilled Picabia. Back in Paris, and now with his mistress Germaine Everling, he was in the city of "les assises dada" where André Breton, Paul Éluard, Philippe Soupault and Louis Aragon met at Certa, a basque bar in the passage de l'Opera. Picabia, the provocateur, was back home.

Picabia continued his involvement in the Dada movement through 1919 in Zürich and Paris, before breaking away from it after developing an interest in Surrealist art. (See Cannibale, 1921.) He denounced Dada in 1921, and issued a personal attack against Breton in the final issue of 391, in 1924.

The same year, he put in an appearance in the René Clair surrealist film Entr'acte, firing a cannon from a rooftop. The film served as an intermission piece for Picabia's avant-garde ballet, Relâche, premiered at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, with music by Erik Satie.^[5]

Francis Picabia, Réveil Matin (Alarm Clock), Dada 4-5, Number 5, 15 May 1919

Later years

In 1922, André Breton relaunched Littérature (magazine) with cover images – different each time – by Picabia, to whom he gave carte blanche for each issue. Picabia drew on religious imagery, erotic iconography, and the iconography of games of chance.^[6]

In 1925, he returned to figurative painting, and during the 1930s became a close friend of the modernist novelist Gertrude Stein. In the early 1940s he moved to the south of France, where his work took a surprising turn: he produced a series of paintings based on the nude glamour photos in French "girlie" magazines like Paris Sex-Appeal, in a garish style which appears to subvert traditional, academic nude painting. Some of these went to an Algerian merchant who sold them on, and so Picabia came to decorate brothels across North Africa under the Occupation.

Before the end of World War II, he returned to Paris where he resumed abstract painting and writing poetry. A large retrospective of his work was held at the Galerie René Drouin in Paris in the spring of 1949. Francis Picabia died in Paris in 1953 and was interred in the Cimetière de Montmartre.

Today

In 2003, a single Picabia painting once owned by André Breton sold for US$1.6 million.^[7]

Gallery

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  Francis Picabia in his studio c.1912

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  Horses, 1911, oil on canvas, 73.3 x 92.5 cm, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Published in the New York Times, New York, 16 February 1913, Page 121

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  Francis Picabia, 1911–12, Paysage à Cassis (Landscape at Cassis), oil on canvas, 50.3 × 61.5 cm, private collection

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  Tarentelle, 1912, oil on canvas, 73.6 x 92.1 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Reproduced in Du "Cubisme" by Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, published in 1912

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  The Procession, Seville, 1912, oil on canvas, 121.9 x 121.9 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.

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  The Dance at the Spring, 1912, oil on canvas, 120.5 x 120.6 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art. Exhibited at the 1913 Armory Show

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  Francis Picabia, 1913, Edtaonisl (Ecclesiastic), oil on canvas, 300.4 x 300.7 cm, Art Institute of Chicago

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  Star Dancer on a Transatlantic Steamer, 1913

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  Francis Picabia, Ici, c'est ici Stieglitz, foi et amour, cover of 291, No1, 1915

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  Francis Picabia, 1915, Fille née sans mère (Girl Born Without a Mother), work on paper, 47.4 x 31.7 cm, Musée d'Orsay

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  Francis Picabia, 1915, Voilà Haviland (La poésie est comme lui), Portrait mécanomorphe de Paul B. Haviland, Musée d'Orsay

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  Francis Picabia, 1919, Réveil Matin (Alarm Clock), ink on paper, 31.8 x 23 cm, Tate, London

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  Francis Picabia, Dada Movement, Dada, Number 5, 15 May 1919

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  Francis Picabia, 1920, Portrait of Cézanne, Portrait of Renoir, Portrait of Rembrandt, Toy monkey and oil on cardboard, dimensions and whereabouts unknown. Reproduced in Cannibale, Paris, n. 1, April 25, 1920

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  Francis Picabia, 1920, La Sainte Vierge (The Blessed Virgin), ink and graphite on paper, 33 x 24 cm, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris

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  Francis Picabia, c. 1921-22, Optophone I, encre, aquarelle et mine de plomb sur papier, 72 x 60 cm. Reproduced in Galeries Dalmau, Picabia, exhibition catalogue, Barcelona, November 18 - December 8, 1922

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  Espagnole et agneau de l'apocalypse, c. 1927-28, gouache, watercolour and brush and ink on paper, 65 × 50 cm, private collection

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  Hera, c. 1929, oil on cardboard, 105 × 75 cm, private collection

Bibliography

• Allan, Kenneth R. “Metamorphosis in 391: A Cryptographic Collaboration by Francis Picabia, Man Ray, and Erik Satie.” Art History 34, No. 1 (February, 2011): 102-125.
• Baker, George. The Artwork Caught by the Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. (ISBN 978-0-262-02618-5)
• Borràs, Maria Lluïsa. Picabia. Trans. Kenneth Lyons. New York: Rizzoli, 1985.
• Calté, Beverly and Arnauld Pierre. Francis Picabia. Tokyo: APT International, 1999.
• Camfield, William. Francis Picabia: His Art, Life and Times. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979.
• Hopkins, David. “Questioning Dada’s Potency: Picabia’s ‘La Sainte Vierge’ and the Dialogue with Duchamp.” Art History 15, No. 3 (September 1992): 317-333.
• Legge, Elizabeth. “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Virgin: Francis Picabia’s La Sainte Vierge.” Word & Image 12, No. 2 (April–June 1996): 218-242.
• Page, Suzanne, William Camfield, Annie Le Brun, Emmanuelle de l’Ecotais, et al., Francis Picabia: Singulier ideal. Paris: Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, 2002.
• Picabia, Francis. I Am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry Prose, and Provocation. Trans. Marc Lowenthal, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. (ISBN 978-0-262-16243-2)
• Pierre, Arnauld. Francis Picabia: La peinture sans aura. Paris: Gallimard, 2002.
• Wilson, Sarah. "Francis Picabia: Accommodations of Desire - Transparencies 1924-1932." New York: Kent Fine Art, 1989. (ISBN 1-878607-04-9)

Dada is the groundwork to abstract art and sound poetry, a starting point for performance art, a prelude to postmodernism, an influence on pop art, a celebration of antiart to be later embraced for anarcho-political uses in the 1960s and the movement that lay the foundation for Surrealism.
—Marc Lowenthal, translator's introduction to Francis Picabia's I Am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose, And Provocation

See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Francis Picabia.

• Anti-art

References

External links

• Comité Picabia; the organization developing a catalogue raisonné of the artist
• Picabia images at CGFA
• Scans of Picabia's publication, 391
• After 391: Picabia's early multimedia experiments Short essay
• Dada Movement in the MoMA Online Collection
• Francis Picabia. Machines and Spanish Women Exhibition at Fundació Antoni Tàpies