Francis Picabia

In 1922, Francis Picabia wrote, “If you want to have clean ideas, change them like shirts.”1 Throughout his audacious and inventive career, which spanned almost 50 years and encompassed painting, performance, poetry, publishing, and film, Picabia lived out that prescription. Although he remains best known as a Dadaist, his work ranged from Impressionist painting to radical abstraction, from iconoclastic provocation to pseudo-classicism, and from photo-based painting to Art Informel. He relished courting controversy, making regular engagements with the press a part of the construction of his artistic persona.
Born in Paris in 1879, Picabia first made his name as a late-coming Impressionist painter in 1905. In the fall of 1912, he exhibited a group of large-scale abstractions, including The Spring and Dances at the Spring [II]. Along with František Kupka’s Amorpha, fugue in two colors and Fernand Léger’s Woman in Blue, Picabia’s canvases marked the arrival of non-objective painting in Paris. This stylistic change was the first of many abrupt reversals that would characterize his career. It also delivered his first major succès de scandale, as critics condemned the new work as “ugly” and “incomprehensible.”
While World War I raged in Europe, Picabia sought exile abroad in New York, Barcelona, and Switzerland. During this time, his activities as a publisher of the journal 391 coincided with the appearance of the machine in his visual work. As in "M’Amenez-y", hard-edged, frontal objects, often copied from scientific magazines and precisely rendered in industrial paints, took center stage. He also began to pepper his compositions with words and phrases. After the war, Picabia returned to Paris, and the Dada movement, led by Tristan Tzara, landed there soon after, inaugurating months of performances, parties, and battles in the press in an all-out assault on the culture of rationality the Dadaists held responsible for the war. Picabia made works like Tableau Rastadada, a mordant self-portrait, finding in Dada a provocative spirit that matched and extended his own.
Picabia continued to cycle through styles and experiment with unorthodox materials. Although he renounced Dada in 1921, certain tenets of that movement persisted in his work, including the appropriation of found imagery: in one of his last stylistic phases, he copied and recombined magazine photographs into new, painted compositions, as in Portrait of a Couple. Throughout, Picabia questioned the meaning and purpose of art even as he practiced it. In 1949, Marcel Duchamp described Picabia’s career as a “kaleidoscopic series of art experiences.”2 Marked by a consistent inconsistency, that career continues to challenge traditional narratives of modernism.
Introduction by Natalie Dupêcher, Museum Research Consortium Fellow, Department of Painting and Sculpture, 2016
Francis Picabia, [Handout], 1921, n.p.; translation adjusted from Picabia, I Am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose, and Provocation, trans. Marc Lowenthal (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2007), 279.
Marcel Duchamp, “Francis Picabia,” in Collection of the Société Anonyme: Museum of Modern Art 1920 (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, published for the Associates in Fine Arts, 1950), 4.
- Introduction
- 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.
- Wikidata
- Q157321
- Introduction
- Picabia is considered one of the most important and influential figures of the Dada movement. He was allied with numerous other modern movements but is perhaps best known for energetically questioning prevailing attitudes about art and for helping to disseminate, through his publications, avant-garde ideas.
- Nationality
- French
- Gender
- Male
- Roles
- Artist, Writer, Genre Artist, Painter, Sculptor
- Names
- Francis Picabia, François Picabia, Francis Marie Martínez Picabia, Francis Martinez de Picabia, Francois Picabia, Francis. Picabia, Francis-Marie Martínez Picabia de la Torre, Francis-Marie Martínez de la Torre, Picabia
- Ulan
- 500006325
Exhibitions
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508: According to the Laws of Chance
Ongoing
MoMA
Collection gallery
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508: Readymade in Paris and New York
Ongoing
MoMA
Collection gallery
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Artist’s Choice: Amy Sillman—The Shape of Shape
Oct 21, 2019–Oct 4, 2020
MoMA
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Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round so Our Thoughts Can Change Direction
Nov 21, 2016–Mar 19, 2017
MoMA
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Dadaglobe Reconstructed
Jun 12–Sep 18, 2016
MoMA
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Francis Picabia has
43 exhibitionsonline.
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Francis Picabia Untitled c. 1901
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Francis Picabia The Spring Saint Cloud, spring or summer 1912
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Francis Picabia Dances at the Spring [II] Saint Cloud, spring or summer 1912
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Francis Picabia Tarentelle Paris, January - early June 1912
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Francis Picabia New York (1913)
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Francis Picabia I See Again in Memory My Dear Udnie Paris, June - July 1914
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Francis Picabia Comic Wedlock Paris, June - July 1914
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Francis Picabia This Has to Do with Me c. June-July 1914
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Francis Picabia Untitled 1917
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Francis Picabia Dada Movement (Mouvement Dada) 1919
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Francis Picabia "M'Amenez-y" Paris, November 1919 - January 1920
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Francis Picabia Tableau Rastadada 1920
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Francis Picabia Monographie Francis Picabia (Francis Picabia Monograph) 1920
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Francis Picabia Reproduction of Francis par Picabia 1920 (frontispiece) from Monographie Francis Picabia (Francis Picabia Monograph) 1920
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Francis Picabia Reproduction of Espagnole (Spanish Woman) (facing page 6) from Monographie Francis Picabia (Francis Picabia Monograph) 1920
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Francis Picabia Plate (facing page 8) from Monographie Francis Picabia (Francis Picabia Monograph) 1920
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Francis Picabia Plate (facing page 12) from Monographie Francis Picabia (Francis Picabia Monograph) 1920
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Francis Picabia Reproduction of Flamenca à la rose rouge (Flamenca with the Red Rose) (following page 12) from Monographie Francis Picabia (Francis Picabia Monograph) 1920
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Francis Picabia Reproduction of Camille Pissarro (facing page 16) from Monographie Francis Picabia (Francis Picabia Monograph) 1920
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Francis Picabia Reproduction of La musique est comme la peinture (Music is Like Painting) (facing page 20) from Monographie Francis Picabia (Francis Picabia Monograph) 1920
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Francis Picabia Reproduction of Force Comique (following page 20) from Monographie Francis Picabia (Francis Picabia Monograph) 1920
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Francis Picabia Reproduction of Untitled (Toreador) (facing page 24) from Monographie Francis Picabia (Francis Picabia Monograph) 1920
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Francis Picabia Plate (facing page 28) from Monographie Francis Picabia (Francis Picabia Monograph) 1920
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Francis Picabia Plate (following page 28) from Monographie Francis Picabia (Francis Picabia Monograph) 1920
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Francis Picabia Plate (facing page 32) from Monographie Francis Picabia (Francis Picabia Monograph) 1920
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Francis Picabia Reproduction ofUntitled (facing page 36) from Monographie Francis Picabia (Francis Picabia Monograph) 1920
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Francis Picabia Plate (following page 36) Monographie Francis Picabia (Francis Picabia Monograph) 1920
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Francis Picabia Reproduction of Petite solitude au milieu des soleils (A Little Solitude in the Midst of Suns) (facing colophon) from Monographie Francis Picabia (Francis Picabia Monograph) 1920
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Francis Picabia Portrait (Possibly Raymond Radiquet) 1921
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Francis Picabia Conversation II c. 1922
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Francis Picabia Fuel Pump (Pompe à combustible) 1922
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Francis Picabia Self-Portrait (1923)
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Francis Picabia Poster for New Year’s Eve event featuring performances of Relâche and Cinésketch by Ballets Suédois, Théâtre des Champs Elysées, Paris, December 31, 1924 1924
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Francis Picabia Transparence - Tête et Cheval (c. 1930)
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Francis Picabia Le Peseur d'âmes (The Weigher of Souls) 1931
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Francis Picabia Vous regardez.... (You are Looking...) (frontispiece) from Le Peseur d'âmes (The Weigher of Souls) 1931
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Francis Picabia Edith et son mari (Edith and Her Husband) from Le Peseur d'âmes (The Weigher of Souls) 1931
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Francis Picabia Docteur James (Doctor James) from Le Peseur d'âmes (The Weigher of Souls) 1931
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Francis Picabia Où sont les âmes des bêtes? (Where are the Souls of Animals?) from Le Peseur d'âmes (The Weigher of Souls) 1931
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Francis Picabia J'étais perdu dans la rêverie (I Was Lost in the Reverie) from Le Peseur d'âmes (The Weigher of Souls) 1931
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Francis Picabia Âmes (Souls) from Le Peseur d'âmes (The Weigher of Souls) 1931
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Francis Picabia Bibliothèque d'Oxford (Library of Oxford) from Le Peseur d'âmes (The Weigher of Souls) 1931
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Francis Picabia Le poid de la lumière (The Weight of the Light) from Le Peseur d'âmes (The Weigher of Souls) 1931
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Francis Picabia L'infinité de Dieu (The Infinity of God) from Le Peseur d'âmes (The Weigher of Souls) 1931
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Francis Picabia Duplicate of Vous regardez.... (You are Looking...) from Le Peseur d'âmes (The Weigher of Souls) 1931
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Francis Picabia Duplicate of Edith et son mari (Edith and Her Husband) from Le Peseur d'âmes (The Weigher of Souls) 1931
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Francis Picabia Duplicate of Docteur James (Doctor James) from Le Peseur d'âmes (The Weigher of Souls) 1931
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Francis Picabia Duplicate of Où sont les âmes des bêtes? (Where are the Souls of Animals?) from Le Peseur d'âmes (The Weigher of Souls) 1931
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