In his 1939 poem “Yes No,” Picabia wrote, “Perhaps I made painting sick but what a pastime to be a doctor.” This idea of “sickening” painting is a leitmotif in Picabia’s practice during the 1930s, a period in which multiple styles and approaches coexist and converge. Portrait d’un docteur (Portrait of a Doctor) began as a straightforward portrayal of Picabia’s friend, Dr. Gaston Raulot-Lapointe. The first version of the portrait depicts the doctor pointing to a table bearing a human skull, and belongs to a group of figurative works characterized by a simplified style with heavy outlines and stark color contrasts. They were painted at Picabia’s home in Mougins and were sent to the Arts Club of Chicago in early 1936 for an exhibition organized with the assistance of Gertrude Stein. Few paintings sold, and most were returned to the artist, including Portrait d’un docteur in its first state.

Around 1938, Picabia played “doctor” to the portrait, submitting it to transformative interventions. These included the reworking of his subject’s face, the addition of light-blue twisted horns to the head, and the superimposition across the composition of forms that have been read both as schematic phalli and pseudo-medical forceps. Picabia’s overpainting darkened the tone of the picture, extending to the lurid green background and the macabre additions to the skull. Still, Picabia continued to take a perverse pleasure in his work, flippantly adding the erroneous date of “1925” during his second, late-1930s painting campaign.

“Tomorrow I am counting on painting to be my doctor,” Picabia continued in “Yes No.” These words, coupled with paintings like Portrait d’un docteur, serve as reminders of the artist’s oftentimes contradictory approach to art-making, in which instances of revision and defacement lead to new avenues of artistic creation.

For Annette King, Joyce H. Townsend, and Bronwyn Ormsby’s essay on Portrait d’un docteur, see mo.ma/picabia_conservation.