Francis Picabia

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Francis Picabia (1879-1953) was a French artist, writer, and bon vivant who contributed to various art movements in the 20th century and became best known as a leader of Dada in Paris.

Francis Picabia viewed his art as an intimate extension of his life. It was a means to express his likes and dislikes, his thoughts and feelings - often without bothering to distinguish between those which were serious or trivial, public or private. That attitude made for enormous variety in the styles and quality of his work, and he insisted on such freedom of expression even when it meant that most of the public might not like or understand what he was doing.

Picabia was born in Paris on or about January 22, 1879. His mother was French and his father was a Spaniard living in Paris. Both parents came from wealthy, distinguished families, and Francis - their only child - was thoroughly spoiled, especially after his mother died when he was seven. He entered the School of Decorative Arts in 1895 and later studied with several teachers, including Félix Cormon. In 1902 he met the sons of the aged impressionist painter Camille Pissarro, who introduced him to their father. Picabia became an Impressionist and travelled extensively to record scenes of France in the relatively objective manner of that style.

Impressionism to Abstraction

By 1908 Picabia had become dissatisfied with Impressionism. He began to paint in more subjective and abstracted styles, particularly the styles of Fauvism and Cubism. He was encouraged by Gabrielle Buffet, a music student whom he married in 1909. They talked about developing "pure painting" - an art which did not imitate nature but could express profound meanings through form and color alone. They compared "pure painting" to music which did not imitate the sounds of nature but which stirred the souls of listeners by harmony and rhythm. At this time Picabia became an active member of the avant-garde in French art. He helped to finance and organize the important exhibition of the Section d'Or in 1912. The poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire named him as one of the artists creating "pure painting" or Orphism.

In 1913 Picabia and his wife visited New York to see the famous Armory Show which introduced modern European art to America. They became friends of the American photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who organized an exhibition of Picabia's work at his gallery, called 291. Two of Picabia's most renowned paintings, Udnie (1913) and Edtaonisl (1913), were huge, abstract compositions based on experiences during that trip to New York.

Machine Style to Dada

When World War I began in Europe, Picabia was drafted into the army. In 1915 he was sent on a supply mission to the Caribbean, but when his ship reached New York he neglected that mission in order to work again with Alfred Stieglitz. It was an important period during which Picabia began to write poetry and to develop a radically new style of painting based on curious machines. Most of the machines were symbolic of man and human activities, because Picabia believed that machines had become the touchstone of the modern world and that man had made machines in his own image. Many of the paintings also incorporated unusual titles and seemingly nonsensical inscriptions. Picabia was influenced in this new style by his French friend Marcel Duchamp, who also settled in New York in 1915.

Late in 1915 Picabia resumed his military mission. For two years he moved around from the Caribbean to Barcelona, Spain, to New York again. In late 1917 he left America permanently for Europe.

In 1919 Picabia met the Dadaists in Zürich who had been attracted by his unusual machine paintings and volumes of poetry bearing such titles as Platonic False Teeth and Poems and Drawings of the Daughter Born without a Mother. The leader of Zürich Dada, Tristan Tzara, moved to Paris in January 1920. A Dada movement began immediately under the leadership of Tzara, Picabia, and André Breton. Parisians were outraged by their deliberately offensive publications, exhibitions, and public activities. Picabia's painting, poetry, and magazine entitled 391 were considered anti-art and anti-literature. By mid-1921, the Dadaists in Paris were quarreling among themselves, and Picabia left the movement. A Dadaist irreverence continued to flavor his work, including his collaboration with René Clair in 1924 on the film Entr'acte. That film became the intermission for Picabia's ballet, Relâche, produced in 1924 by the Swedish Ballet with music by Erik Satie.

Years in the South of France

In 1924 Picabia and his new wife, Germaine Everling, moved to Mougins on the French Riviera. There he lived the life of a playboy until the outbreak of World War II. He extended his reputation for numerous girl friends and fast automobiles. During the early 1930s, he began living on his yacht with Olga Mohler, who became his last wife in 1940.

Picabia continued to work prodigiously as a painter. From about 1924 to 1928 he produced collages and distorted figurative paintings later called "the Monsters." His next paintings, from 1928 into the early 1930s, were called "transparencies." They were characterized by multiple layers of transparent images - many drawn from sources in ancient and Renaissance art - which created poetic, dream-like effects. Later in the 1930s Picabia produced a variety of simplified figurative studies, superimposed images, and abstract compositions.

During World War II Picabia's life style became more modest. Most of his paintings presented sentimental subjects - nudes, toreadors, flower girls - derived from popular reproductions in postcards and cheap magazines.

After the war, in 1945, Picabia and Olga returned to Paris. His work flourished in a new round of abstract art. Many old friendships were renewed, and he published several volumes of poetry. He died in Paris on November 30, 1953.

Further Reading

Picabia's writings are available in French in Francis Picabia. Ecrits (2 vols., 1975 and 1978). Picabia's magazine, 391, has been reproduced in a study by Michel Sanouillet (1960). The most extensive study of Picabia is William Camfield, Francis Picabia (1979). An abbreviated study by Camfield is the exhibition catalogue of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Francis Picabia (1970). Picabia's role in Orphism has been explored by Virginia Spate in Orphism (1979).

Additional Sources

Picabia, New York: Rizzoli, 1985.

Picabia, Francis Martinez de (1879-1953). Although he can be described as a painter-poet and founder of reviews (391, Cannibale), he himself scorned such labels. Of Cuban extraction, he studied at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts and exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Indépendants in 1903. The most fertile phase of his literary career coincided with his involvement in the Dada movement, the ideal vehicle for his jovial, iconoclastic, and hedonistic nihilism, seen at its best in Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère (1920). Much of his writing is aphoristic, but some poems (e.g. Pensées sans langage, 1919) read like long, automatic monologues, and Unique Eunuque (1920) contains lines where the word-order seems random.

[Keith Aspley]

Quotes:

"The world is divided into two categories: failures and unknowns."

"The family spirit has rendered man carnivorous."

"The essence of a man is found in his faults."

"Men have always need of god! A god to defend them against other men.."

"My ass contemplates those who talk behind my back."

"Let us never forget that the greatest man is never more than an animal disguised as a god."

See more famous quotes by Francis Picabia

Francis Picabia
Francis Picabia in his studio
Birth name	François Marie Martinez Picabia
Born	January 22, 1879(1879-01-22)
Died	November 30, 1953 (aged 74)
Nationality	French
Field	Painting

Francis Picabia (born François Marie Martinez Picabia, 22 January 1879 – 30 November 1953) was a French painter and poet.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Images 3 Bibliography 4 See also 5 References 6 External links

Biography

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. His father was of aristocratic Spanish descent.^[1] 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.^[1] 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.

In the beginning of his career, from 1903 to 1908, he 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.^[2] From 1909, he came under the influence of the cubists and 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 the village of Puteaux. 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.

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 the June of 1915, though it was 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. The magazine '291' devoted an entire issue to him, he met Man Ray, Gabrielle joined him, Duchamp joined him, drugs and alcohol became a problem and his health suffered. He suffered from dropsy and tachycardia. New York ate him up.^[3] These years can be characterized as Picabia's proto-Dada period, consisting mainly of his portraits mécaniques.

Later, in 1916, while in Barcelona and within a small circle of refugee artists that included Marie Laurencin and Robert 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 Duchamp in America. 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 Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, 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-Elysées, with music by Erik Satie.

In 1925, he returned to figurative painting, and during the 1930s became a close friend of 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.

In 2003 a single Picabia painting once owned by Andre Breton sold for $1.6 million.^[4]

Images

Star Dancer on a Transatlantic Steamer, 1913

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

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

Self-Portrait, c. 1923, ink on paper, 25 × 21 cm, private collection

Bibliography

• The Artwork Caught by the Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris Cambridge: October Books (2007); by George Baker - (ISBN 0-2620-2618-X)
• I Am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose, and Provocation Cambridge: The MIT Press (2007); by Francis Picabia, translated by Marc Lowenthal- (ISBN 0-2621-6243-1)

See also

• Anti-art

References

1. ^ ^{a b} Jori Finkel (December 2008), Artist Dossier: Francis Picabia, ART+AUCTION, http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/29431/francis-picabia/, retrieved 2008-12-10 
2. ^ [1] online biography, retrieved June 15, 2009
3. ^ Paris Match No 2791
4. ^ BBC News, "Surrealist Sale Smashes Records."

External links

• Extensive Picabia website
• Comité Picabia Site of the organization developing a catalogue raisonné of the artist
• Picabia art and biography
• 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 - Dadaist/Surrealist Painter - A Gallery
• Francis Picabia, Singulier idéal by Joseph Nechvatal

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