While the capricious career and lifestyle of the French artist Francis Picabia pose problems for easy categorization, they amply illustrate one point: The man was definitely in touch with his libido. Call him what you will — painter, writer, poet, magazine publisher, collector of yachts and fast cars, womanizer extraordinaire — he knew how to stir things up and had a great time doing it.
As a painter, Picabia went through styles the way a society lady goes through luncheon outfits. By the time he reached his early 40s, he had tried his hand at Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism and Orphism; helped launch Dada with his dear friend, Marcel Duchamp; and been a founding member of Surrealism in Paris. He also had written three books of poetry and a novel, designed sets for a ballet, wrote a screenplay, and put out an avant-garde journal. Along the way he spouted aphorisms such as, “If you want to have clean ideas, change them as often as you change your shirt” and “Conviction is a disease.”
Picabia is best known for his artistic output as a Dadaist and Surrealist, and his most highly regarded works have been his so-called “machinist” paintings done from about 1914 to 1918, which show the cool eroticism and streamlined beauty of machines.
Picabia continued to make experimental art until his death in 1953, but scholars pretty much relegated him to the chapters on Dada and Surrealism, dismissing later works as trifles or kitsch.
Now, thanks in part to his influence on a number of major contemporary artists, people are taking a closer look at Picabia’s efforts during the last 30 years of his life. “Late Works of Francis Picabia,” an exhibition at The Arts Club of Chicago, shows that Picabia remained dizzyingly active and relished challenging bourgeois sensibilities to the end of his life.
The 39 paintings in the exhibition, in contrast to most of Picabia’s earlier works, are mainly figurative and in many cases lyrical. They range from his distorted, expressive “monster” figures to gorgeous, layered “transparencies” full of classical references to lush depictions of female nudes to a final return to abstraction.
It’s no wonder that Picabia made art historians’ heads spin. “The late work of Picabia has been a real mystery for people; they didn’t know what to do with it. It was discounted for most of his life,” said Kathy Cottong, director of The Arts Club and exhibition curator.
In fact, art critics condemned Picabia’s works of the 1930s and 1940s, accusing him of following the “low” art dictates of fascism. Response to an exhibition of his landscapes, genre and mythological scenes organized by Gertrude Stein at The Arts Club in 1936 was quite discouraging. Picabia ended up destroying many of the works, but it’s not clear if that was a direct result of the audience’s negative reaction.
Cottong’s interest in Picabia was sparked when she saw an exhibition of his later paintings last spring at the Michael Werner Gallery in New York. “My mouth just fell open,” she recalled. “I hadn’t ever seen this work in person before, and it’s such a totally different thing than seeing it in catalogs.”
In recent years the art community has begun to re-evaluate Picabia, with some people crowning him as a kind of grandfather of Postmodernism. Works by artists such as Sigmar Polke, David Salle, John Currin and Julian Schnabel, among others, show Picabia’s influence. They have seized on his ironic approach to making art, his melding of a wide range of styles and his filching of images from popular culture. Like artists today, Picabia felt free to appropriate whatever he pleased from the annals of art history. “He stole everything he could,” Cottong remarked.
This might have stemmed from Picabia’s sense of entitlement as a member of the Parisian aristocracy. His father was a chancellor at the Cuban embassy and his mother came from a wealthy French family. “He had the means to do whatever he wanted to do, which, amazingly, he did,” Cottong noted. “He painted whatever he wanted to paint.”
Tired of the politics of the Parisian art world, Picabia moved to his house on the Cote D’Azur in 1925. There, inspired by the ancient frescoes of Catalonia, he began working on the monster paintings that depicted wildly dancing grotesques, each endowed with several sets of eyes, in saturated colors. Paintings such as the mysterious, densely patterned “Two Transparent People” and frenetic “Bather” portray a primal, pulsating life-force.
By the late 1920s and early 1930s Picabia was creating his “transparencies,” paintings full of classically rendered nudes layered with images of animals, artifacts and plants. Along with mining a host of historical art styles in this series, Picabia used old glazing techniques on them, deepening their semblance of antiquity.
Then Picabia turned his gaze on an unlikely aesthetic source — black and white photographs from French girlie magazines. From the late 1930s to mid-1940s he painted women in various stages of undress or already naked, lounging in carefree poses on the beach or in dark rooms. These works more than any other of his later paintings drew derision from critics, some of whom charged that Picabia created them for rich Algerians with a taste for Nazi art.
But Cottong rejected the idea that these works are mere kitsch. “I think he was investigating through photography a way of seeing and a way of distortion. Some of the women seem to have elongated arms or their backs are distorted. He was a great draftsman and could have remedied some of those distortions but he chose not to.
“I also think he was utterly fascinated by the idea of taking soft-core pornography and making that into a painting, which is considered much more `high’ art,” Cottong continued. “Above all, he was an extreme manipulator.”
After World War II Picabia went back to abstraction, making paintings that recalled his own works completed decades earlier. These, too, contain sexual allusions among their simple shapes and anthropomorphic elements.
Picabia left an enigmatic legacy that Cottong predicted will keep scholars and curators busy for years to come. “This is not the end-all Picabia show, just a beginning,” she said. “At some point a museum will organize a major exhibition around this.”
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“Late Works of Francis Picabia” continues through Dec. 16 at The Arts Club of Chicago, 201 E. Ontario.
