Francis Picabia

Francis-Marie Martínez Picabia (Paris, January 22, 1879-Ib., November 30, 1953) was a French painter.

Biography

Picabia descended through his father from a family that arrived in Cuba from Galicia; his mother was French-Basque. Picabia's parents met in Paris when his father was working as a diplomat in France.

He worked in nearly all of the major contemporary styles, including Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Fauvism, Dada, Surrealism, and Abstract Art. He also did figurative painting, drawing and collage. He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts and at the School of Decorative Arts in Paris. He received a strong impressionist and Fauvist influence, especially from the work of Pissarro and Sisley.

From 1909 to 1911 he was linked to cubism and was a member of the Puteaux group, where he met the Duchamp brothers (Marcel, Jaques and Raymond) in the Parisian suburb of Puteaux, where they met on Sundays to discuss art, mathematics and other topics. In 1913 he traveled to New York, on the occasion of the exhibition "The International Exhibition of Modern Art", held in a military barracks, and from where it was intended to make the work of the European avant-garde known to the American public, already minimally introduced by the photographer and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz and the American Dada group. Picabia lived in New York until 1916, when he traveled to Barcelona to take advantage of Spanish neutrality during the First World War, where he stayed for two years.

In Barcelona he hardly maintained contact with the Catalan avant-garde, except with Josep Maria Tamburini, who in 1916 edited the first issue of his Dadaist magazine "391".

The format, conception and typography owe much to the magazine 291, edited by Alfred Stieglitz and in which Picabia collaborated, but the assumptions are different: the nihilistic, cold, ironic and destructive tone are properly Dadaist. The magazine was published between 1917 and 1924, in Barcelona, New York, Zurich and Paris, and collaborated on it, among others, Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, Tristan Tzara, Man Ray and Jean Cocteau. Together with Dada magazine, it was the most important of this movement.

Shortly after 1917, Picabia traveled to Paris, where he fully entered the Dada circle led by Tristan Tzara, participating in demonstrations and other scandals.

In 1922, the Dalmau Gallery organized an exhibition that brought together 46 works by Picabia, with a catalog edited by André Breton. The works prior to 1922 could be described as mechanomorphic, which owe much to the futurist dynamism. "The Rush" (1914, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid) belongs to a group of works produced by the artist in 1914, which could be defined as abstract transpositions of intimate experiences.

Around 1924 he seems to return to figuration, especially after the founding of the surrealist group: in these works he seems to mock that surreal oneirism, painting dematerialized figures, and later on he would initiate a dialogue with artistic tradition. His interest in literature and language was particularly evident in his later works.

In 1930 the first of the great retrospectives on Picabia was held at the French gallery Rosenberg, where the work between 1900 and 1930 was shown.

Books published

• 2015 Fucking hell. (Editorial Malpaso, 2015, ISBN 978-84-15996-91-0)