Francis Picabia was a French avant-garde painter, poet and typographist. He was successively involved with the art movements such as Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism.
Background
Francis Picabia was born on January 22, 1879, in Paris, Ile-de-France, France. He was a son of an attaché at the Cuban legation 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.
Education
Francis Picabia was enrolled at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs in Paris from 1895 to 1897, and later studied with several teachers, including Félix Cormon.
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. 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.
In 1913 Picabia visited New York to see the famous Armory Show which introduced modern European art to America. He 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.
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.
In 1924 Picabia 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.
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 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.
Francis Picabia died on November 30, 1953, in Paris.
Quotations:
"A free spirit takes liberties even with liberty itself. "
"Knowledge is ancient error reflecting on its youth. "
"The world is divided into two categories: failures and unknowns. "
"Only useless things are indispensable. "
Connections
In 1909, Francis Picabia married Gabrielle Buffet, a musician. They had four children. The marriage ended in divorce in 1930. He started a new life with Germaine Everling, whom he met in 1917. Everling and Picabia lived together, in a house they built, with their son Lorenzo, born in January 1920. During the early 1930s, he began living on his yacht with Olga Mohler, who became his last wife in 1940.