Will the Real Francis Picabia Please Stand Up?

   Francis Picabia suffered from perpetual boredom. What else would explain his capricious career? The Paris-born painter and poet cycled through art movements like some men with women, or fancy cars. (He owned well over 100.) First there was his foray into post-Impressionism at the turn of the last century, followed by an abstractionist about-face with Cubism. He got in on the ground floor of Dada in New York during World War I, but roundly rejected the scene back in Paris, après la guerre. There were stints with writing and avant-garde film-making in the 1920s before he resumed figuration with some new twists: namely, monsters and multilayered images. He painted nudes of pinup models while living in the south of France during the Second World War, then returned to Paris — and abstract painting — where he continued playing with different styles and aesthetic ideas until his boredom finally ceased. Picabia died in 1953 at the age of 74.

“When I have finished smoking, I am not interested in the butts,” the artist once quipped. So with a certain je ne give a damn pas, he emptied that ashtray early and often.

Which brings us to a fall 2024 show at Michael Werner Gallery in New York, which featured a selection of Picabia’s later works, made long after his post-Impressionist landscapes or splashy Cubist successes. Even Dada, the movement that claimed him more than any other, had no place among the paintings in Francis Picabia: Femmes, which through-lined the one theme that held the artist’s attention throughout his variegated career. Twenty-eight portraits spanning 25 years reveal an expansive, egalitarian appetite for the female form, from Renaissance and Romanesque knockoffs to flat-out contemporary kitsch. Femmes, as a small-scale survey,prompted a teasing question: “Will the real Francis Picabia please stand up?”

No, he will not — the man was too busy sitting behind the wheel of a convertible, cruising around Cannes. The artist as aristocrat is a notion that inspired Picabia’s detractors. There were those who disliked him for what appeared to be a congenitally charmed existence. Money (until much later in life) was no object and fame came in spite of his oppositional defiance. He was called a playboy. A provocateur. A prankster. So singular in his plurality that he categorically refused to be placed in any category; a non-dualist at best and a nihilist to say the least. “Artists, so they say, make fun of the bourgeoisie; me, I make fun of the bourgeoisie and the artists,” he stated in 1923, after breaking from the Dadaists. (Gone were the days of his good pal Marcel Duchamp upending the art establishment one urinal at a time.) His personal criterion for art was more philosophical than conceptual: “Art is a pharmaceutical product for imbeciles,” he wrote in 1920, while still wearing his Dada hat.

Four different hats are presented within the first suite of paintings in Femmes, capturing the artist’s late-ish years in Côte d'Azur, best described as an era of incongruity and experimentation typically reserved for an emerging rather than aging artist. From left to right along the gallery’s hallway a portrait of a coal-eyed Marlene Dietrich in no-nonsense 1940s attire titled “La Résistance” (ca. 1943-1944) is followed by a Fauvist take on some charming gamine in “Portrait de femme” (ca. 1936-1937). Up next, an untitled 1936 painting of a far more antiquated female subject, its surface murkily cracked to mimic a Greek or Roman relic, followed by a perplexingly gilded, over-glazed “Têtes” (ca. 1930-1934), composed of densely congealed heads so scaly in texture that they appear reptilian. There is little evidence to suggest that all four works are from the same painter — much less a pre-eminent painter — no doubt a point of pride for a gallery that’s been promoting Picabia well before MoMa’s major retrospective in 2016, which introduced his impressively unorthodox career to a wider American audience. Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round so Our Thoughts Can Change Direction, co-organized with Kunsthaus in Zurich, marked 100 years since the birth of Dada — and the height of Picabia’s career, with his proliferation of text-driven paintings and poetry publications at the time. The retrospective’s title, one of the artist’s many aphoristic zingers, is more polite than the bit about the cigarette butts, but works just as well in baring a restless, unserious soul. Leading up to his Dada defection in 1921, something of a written confession:

   Not for nothing, just as Femmes was about to close at the gallery on East 77th Street, a few blocks north at the Guggenheim, Harmony and Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910–1930, had recently opened, featuring a lineup of Picabia’s early contemporaries, and Picabia himself. One painting, nonsensically titled “Edtaonisl (Ecclesiastic) (Edtaonisl [Ecclésiastique])” (1913), represents, non-representationally, a rapidly modernizing world through a whirl of abstract forms and exuberant color. Picabia based the painting on a scandalous scene he witnessed when traveling by steamer across the Atlantic for the Armory Show that same year — the only artist from Europe who apparently could afford to attend — involving an onboard dance rehearsal and one very captivated Catholic priest. Picabia’s abstract paintings quickly knit him into Manhattan’s art scene, where he at once declared: “New York is the cubist, the futurist city. It expresses in its architecture, its life, its spirit, the modern thought.” But the self-styled arriviste’s Cubist (and post-Cubist) honeymoon ended as quickly as it began as he threw himself into his “mecanomorphs” — highly suggestive machine-based works on paper produced during World War I that reflected a growing ambivalence about the avant-garde, and his glittery New York circle of friends. (One such mecanomorph, “Ici, c'est ici Stieglitz / foi et amour” (1915) depicted the photographer Alfred Stieglitz as a dismantled camera.)

“A new gadget that lasts only five minutes is worth more than an immortal work that bores everyone,” Picabia insisted. Though Femmes is devoid of his mecanomorph drawings, the gadget he speaks of exists everywhere in his art. Simply put, it is whatever comes next. And what followed for Picabia, after Cubism, the machine portraits, Dada, and his subsequent denunciation of Dada, (Surrealism, too), was a new take on figurative painting in the mid-1920s in the form of monsters: bird-beaked creatures with plague-like appeal, densely painted yet absurdly flat in their caricatured outlines. Several appear in Femmes, including “La femme au chien” (ca. 1925-1927), featuring a beaked female in repose by the shoreline with her dog. Harsh flecks of white Ripolin house paint accent her body (as well as parts of the dog) that serve to further distract from the painting’s discordant scene. Picabia’s penchant for making “bad paintings” is well documented, but it is only in person that one truly appreciates his own self sabotage via utility-grade materials. “Untitled (Venus and Adonis)” (ca. 1925-1927), also on view, depicts the ill-fated pair dancing like Day of the Dead skeletons, their Ripolin outlines as subtle as war paint.

   Unlike Picabia’s post-Impressionist landscapes, painted from postcards, or his mecanomorph drawings, copied from engineers’ illustrations, the “monsters” do not appear to rely on reproduced images. Instead, these wretched characters seem to reflect something deeper in Picabia himself. He admits as much in his poem “Baccarat”: “I am a beautiful monster / who shares his secrets with the wind. / What I love most in others / is myself.”

By 1930, Picabia had begun segueing from beautiful monsters into his “transparency” paintings, which layered and overlapped images for a kinetic, filmic effect to encourage unconscious and dreamlike associations. The “transparencies” are perhaps the most Picabian paintings of all: a cloisonné of classical and contemporary, figurative and abstract, confounding and familiar. In a way they are like collages, assembling different elements, genres, and styles into a single, surrealistic composition. Several were accounted for in Femmes, including “Deux personnages transparents” (ca. 1924-1932), a rocky marriage between Picabia’s “monsters” and multilayering approach. The painting is less of a transparency and more of an opacity with its dense tones and overdone arrangement of its ghastly little duo enveloped in a dark storm of heart-shaped leaves one, resembling a plague doctor, the other, a glitched wraith with at least six sets of eyes. “Briseis” (1929), which occupies the same gallery wall, lives up to the “transparencies” in name with a near-watercolor effect; like other works from this period, the painting’s title is a Greco-Roman reference (Briseis was, after all, Achilles’ spoil of war). Butterfly wings sprout from a skull transposed onto her half-kneeling body, a most delicate memento mori, as a second female, akin to a mannequin, emerges from the landscape. The mannequin’s hand resembles a fashion sketch — a modern touch — stenciled onto the central figure. “Briseis” is an imbroglio (of sensibilities, of centuries) and it’s hard to tell if Picabia was being serious with his “transparencies,” or if the series was just another shoulder-shrug to Modernism. (If it’s any indication, he did once say: “a free spirit takes liberties even with liberty itself.”)

   From one end of Michael Werner Gallery to the other, liberty abounds. There is no signature look, no singular vision, that makes Picabia’s work instantly recognizable; the pickpocket does not discriminate. Throughout his career (and throughout Femmes), Picabia seems to have remained steadfastly shtick-less, approaching his praxis like a decadent buffet, sometimes going back for seconds, but never with the same plate. He once stated that the world is divided into two categories: failures and unknowns. If failures are the ones who make it — the sellouts with their work in all the major museums — Picabia preferred to remain unknown. Unlike, say, the Japanese contemporary artist, Yayoi Kusama — now dominating the art world with her polka-dotted winter squash — who has solemnly proclaimed “It is for the pumpkins that I keep going,” Picabia appeared to be bored out of his gourd. Why was this the case?

Francis-Marie Martinez de Picabia was born in 1879, the only child of a French mother from a wealthy family and a Spanish-Cuban father who held a prominent position at the Cuban embassy in Paris. According to biographer Beverley Calté, Picabia showed “great independence of character” very early on as well as artistic promise. But when he was seven, his mother died and his world was rendered femme-less; he grew up in a household with his father, uncle, and maternal grandfather. His uncle, an art collector, and grandfather, an amateur photographer, no doubt guided Picabia along his cultured path … but what is a motherless enfant terrible to do? Early abandonment can cause persistent feelings of emptiness and a general disconnect throughout one’s life, where nothing ever feels quite right, or lasts for very long. His mother’s sudden absence would have certainly left a mère-shaped hole in his heart. A core abandonment wound, paired with affluence (and confidence), might explain Picabia’s insatiable need for constant excitement — a contempt for the predictable, a disdain for the familiar — on full, unapologetic display in Femmes.

In an essay titled “Francis Picabia: His Legendary Illegitimacy,” the late art critic Dave Hickey writes, “Picabia has become the resonant, multi-valent wild card in the hand of painters that twentieth century modernism has dealt us.” Hickey was something of a wild card himself — a lowkey genius from Texas who was as comfortable running a gallery in Manhattan as he was in Austin, at one point serving as Executive Editor for Art in America, and at another, writing outlaw country music in Nashville. If there were ever two soulmates who could rail against the stale conventions of institutions, Picabia and Hickey were twin flames. He later continues in the essay, “Artists seeking precedents and permissions to make more radical pictures or more traditional ones, have found them in Picabia since, by treating modernism as just another style, he opened the modernist discourse at both ends.”

Picabia’s openness — or ambivalence — makes for an interesting story if not always interesting art. Facing the “transparencies” in the gallery’s front room, a series of nudes inspired by photographs of pinup models from the 1930s — radically traditional, as Dave Hickey might say, given their lack of originality or edge, we can ask what makes them more of a mystery than a cliché. Plenty of Twentieth Century heavy hitters evolved into abstract art, allowing their images to eventually empty out (Picasso and Kandinsky immediately come to mind), but how many of these artists toggled back the other way, and did so with a vengeance? The nudes share zero DNA with Picabia’s surreal, even supernatural, paintings, though they were produced just a few years later. It has been said that the Second World War took a toll on the artist’s lavish lifestyle in the Côte d'Azur (literally — he lived on a yacht), and that a business opportunity arose with an Algerian dealer who purchased Picabia’s pin-up gals for his North African brothels. “Nu de dos” (ca. 1942-1943), or “nude from behind,” is one such example, with its subject basking in bad lighting against a black backdrop. She is not particularly attractive or alluring, which actually makes her the perfect wartime muse (or brothel visual). A modern-day Briseis! These nudes have been called garish, tasteless — one critic from The Guardian suggested they were Nazi propaganda. But their greatest sin? Not being terribly interesting to look at.

The same year Picabia embarked on “Nu de dos,” he produced a series of so-called “pocket paintings,” two of which could be spotted in Femmes, so sealed in their own stylistic vacuum it is impossible to detect any homologous relationship to his nudes. Two 3 x 4 inch paintings, “Tableau de Poche” (1942) and “Tableau de Poche (Nu)” (1942) are paired together, practically swallowed whole by their chunky Old World picture frames. The poches are primitive parodies of ancient Greek pottery; tiny clay-colored portraits — one, a crudely done face, the other, a crackled nude — that appear more like art-class exercises inspired by a field trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art than like works of an artist who had a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. The pocket paintings poke fun at their own provenance, intentionally crackled and lacquered to look centuries old, a technique seen elsewhere in the show (like the reptilian “Têtes” greeting visitors to the gallery). The use of “craquelure” involves skill — Picabia had a knack for getting layers of paint to interact with thicker varnish for the desired effect — but its fauxness feels mischievous. One more hat added to his growing collection, and he didn’t deny it: “Each artist is a mold. I aspire to be many. One day I’d like to write on the wall of my house: Artist in all genres.”

   For all the femmes in Femmes, the most telling archetype is that of the mother. (Quelle surprise.) Picabia had a complicated trajectory with women in his life — his second wife was the nanny to a son he shared with his longtime mistress from the period of his first marriage. Yet beyond the busty blondes and beautiful monsters — the stenciled feminine forms superimposed onto one another in an orgy of the artist’s own imagination — the subject of mother remains inscrutable. Three such paintings left their mark during my visit, starting with “Maternité bleue” (1936-1938), a Medieval-ish Madonna and child, complete with crackled paint, to insinuate a much earlier epoch. The painting’s predominant blue of course connotes the purity of the Virgin Mary, as the male child, cherubic and clutching, gazes off into the distance. But the painting is harsh, even gauche, intentionally so; mother and child are ecclesiastic imposters donning cheap red lipstick to match the painting’s decidedly tacky frame. Then there is “Mère et enfant” (1937), which wastes no time in its unsettling depiction of a dead-eyed woman grasping the hand of her young son like a Byzantine zombie, standing before an archway that acts as a black portal beckoning them both. The painting is so intensely weathered that it suggests mother and son are trapped together for all time.

Singing quietly on the wall behind the gallery’s reception desk was a single painting titled “Dimanche” (1951). It is the most recent painting in Femmes, and therefore one of Picabia’s final paintings, that of a saintly figure. She is faceless, wrapped in an aureole of blue and white, set against a dark background. Composed of five plain concentric layers, this sole painting seems to hold all the answers. “Dimanche,” or Sunday, is a tribute to the universal mother — an embodiment of wholeness and love that Picabia fought and resisted at every turn. The one thing he could not reinvent, despite his innumerable attempts. A beautiful monster in search of his missing heart: “What I like is to invent, to imagine, to make myself at every moment a new man, and then, to forget him, forget everything.”