Francis Picabia was a French artist and writer, known for his stylistic volatility and his decadent, debonair persona. Born into an affluent family to a French mother and Spanish father, Picabia began his career as a consummate Impressionist: his early landscapes deftly mimic the elder generation’s vividly coloured and light dappled surfaces. After experimenting with techniques borrowed from many of the early twentieth century’s ‘isms’ – Neo-Impressionism, Fauvism and Futurism – Picabia developed an abstracted visual language, painting in a Cubist-inspired network of overlapping planes in works that were later exhibited in the era-defining 1913 Amory Show in New York. During the First World War, he also began producing pictures of machines, inventing elaborate yet defective contraptions that also conveyed an erotic preoccupation with the human body.
In the late 1910s, Picabia became involved in the iconoclastic, irreverent activities of the Dada movement – he edited the avant-garde journal 391 – as well as the Surrealists’ painterly inquiries into the unconscious. He publicly and dramatically denounced both movements in the early 1920s. A restless maverick, Picabia then abandoned Paris for a luxurious life of galas, yachts and automobiles on the French Riviera, spending the rest of his career inventing (and then jettisoning) new pictorial styles and gestures. His ‘Monster’ pictures of the 1920s depict human/beast hybrids in grotesque union; his ‘transparencies’ of the late 1920s and early 1930s layer images hijacked from classical myth and Old Master paintings in occult, nightmarish visions; and his ‘Kitsch’ works from the late 1930s and 1940s appropriate photographs of starlets and pin-up models, with the artist reworking them with a lurid and poster-like lustre. Upon his return to Paris after the Second World War, Picabia’s late style marked a return to abstraction: swollen, totemic forms began to forebodingly dominate his canvases.
A significant retrospective of Picabia’s work was held at the Galerie Rene Drouin in Paris in 1949 and, across the Atlantic, another was held at the Rose Fried Gallery in New York in 1950. Picabia’s wilful refusal to stick to a style or movement – to conform to anything but his own artistic capriciousness, his appetite for self-transformation – confounds typical narratives of linear development. He died three years after the New York retrospective, leaving behind an oeuvre that Marcel Duchamp accurately described as ‘kaleidoscopic’.
