Francis Picabia

A French and American artist, designer, graphic illustrator, poet and publicist, who had Cuban citizenship.

The artist’s father was a Cuban attaché; his mother was a Frenchwoman. Financially secured Picabia studied with Fernand Cormon and other well-known teachers at the School of Applied Arts. After graduation, the artist worked at the studio of Cormon with his classmates Georges Braque and Marie Laurencin for the next four years.

Francis Picabia became famous as an eccentric artist who does not obey any rules and stylistic dogmas in his work. He was called “Papa Dada”, since he was the largest figure of the Dada movement in the United States and France, and the editor of the avant-garde magazine “391”, where the works of artists of this movement were published. Together with his friend and companion Marcel Duchamp, Picabia had a great influence on contemporary art, in particular, on Surrealism and conceptualism. The main galleries of contemporary art in the world still actively acquire the master’s paintings.

Key ideas:

– Francis Picabia was one of the most intriguing and incomprehensible artists of the twentieth century. His work amazes with its boldness, eccentricity and a wide variety of styles. The artist easily moved from one avant-garde movement to another one, changing his manner, the way of working and presenting his paintings.

– He always aspired to the purest and most authentic depiction of reality, experimenting with the form of objects, from the Cubist decomposition of the object into separate components to a strange combination of mechanical elements and significant inscriptions in his works. At the same time, Picabia, regardless of the form of expression, addressed the most secret desires of the human soul, expressing the aspirations and hopes of his generation.

– Having tried himself in various movements and leaving his vivid trace in them, Francis Picabia creates his own artistic style, which is both a continuation of already existing movements and, at the same time, a protest against them. These works, filled with a deeply individual vision of the author, are so paradoxical and extraordinary that sometimes they bring art to absurdity and nonsense.

– The most recognizable and typical for his individual painting style were so called «anthropomorphic blueprints», which replaced the artist’s portrait painting. In them, Picabia used various technical elements and gave them similarities with human forms, adding unexpected, unsuitable and vivid details. The most famous works in this style are “Here is a woman” (1915), “A daughter born without a mother” (1917), “Child carburetor” (1919). The bright “mechanized” drawings of Picabia are full of provocation, caustic sarcasm and challenge. They shock the public and make you look at the familiar objects from a new angle, demonstrating the power of the human imagination and the ability to see real images in any, even the most abstract or absurd form. It is these works that best correspond to his bright individuality and are the peak of his creative career. As a theoretician, Francis Picabia in the Manifesto of the Cannibal Dada (1917) proposed “to stand before a dada speaking on behalf of life, accusing you of the ability to love only because of snobbery, only when it is expensive.”