Picabia, Francis (1879–1953). French painter, designer, writer, and editor, born in Paris of a Spanish father and a French mother. His talent as an artist was modest, but his restless and energetic personality gave him a significant role successively in the Cubist, Dadaist, and Surrealist movements, and through his publications he played an important role in disseminating avant-garde ideas. A private income enabled him to carry on his activities without having to worry about earning a living, as well as to indulge his love of fast cars, fast women, and wild living in general.
Picabia studied at the École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, 1895–7, and for the next ten years was a prolific and successful painter of Impressionist landscapes. In 1908–9 he experimented with
Neo-Impressionism, and then with
Fauvism and Cubism. In 1911 he met Marcel
Duchamp, who was to be the most important influence on his career, and with him became an exponent of
Orphism. He painted his first purely abstract works in 1912. In 1913 he visited New York as spokesman for the Cubist pictures in the
Armory Show, and he returned in 1915–16, when he, Duchamp, and
Man Ray were involved in the first stirrings of Dada. He contributed to
Stieglitz's review
291, and after moving to Barcelona (where he lived 1916–17), he launched his own magazine based on it—
391 (1917–24). In 1917 he returned to New York for six months (during which he produced three Americanized issues of
391), then lived in Zurich (1918–19) before returning to Paris, where he helped to launch the Dada movement in 1919 and began publishing a review called
Cannibale. However, in 1921 he denounced Dada for being no longer ‘new', and became involved with André
Breton and the nascent Surrealist movement. In 1924 he attacked this, too, in the pages of
391, but some of his later works are in a Surrealist idiom. From 1925 to 1945 he lived mainly on the Côte d'Azur, experimenting with various styles. In 1945 he settled permanently in Paris and in his final years returned to abstract painting.
Apart from his contributions to avant-garde magazines, Picabia published various pamphlets and wrote poetry. He also conceived the fantasy ballet
Relâche (1924), with music by Erik Satie, together with the film
Entr'acte (directed by René Clair), which was used to fill the intermission between the ballet's two acts. Among Picabia's paintings, the most highly-regarded today are those in his ‘machinist’ style, in which mechanistic and
biomorphic forms are combined in dynamic compositions. The most famous is
I See Again in Memory My Dear Udnie (MOMA, New York, 1914).
