Francis Picabia

Biography

Francis Picabia, one of the founders of Dada movement who owned a massive collection of vintage cars and yachts, was known for his witty art, absurdist humour, and made innovative artworks that are now selling for as much as $1,600,000. He was born François Marie Martinez Picabia on January 22, 1879, in Paris, France, of a Cuban diplomat father, and a French mother. From 1895-1897 he studied art at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. He evolved to painting in the Impressionist style of Alfred Sisley and exhibited his works at the Salon des Independantes of 1903, along with the works of, Paul Gauguin, and Paul Cezanne among other post-impressionists. He found inspiration in the works of Henri Matisse and changed his manner of painting to Fauvism. By 1911, Picabia developed his highly personal fusion of Fauvism and Cubism. At that time he became a friend of Guillaume Apollinaire, who introduced him to Marcel Duchamp and Fernand Léger. They had meetings at the studio of Jacques Villon in the village of Puteaux, near Paris, and became known as the Puteaux Group. Picabia also developed a more lyrical variation of Cubism which was named Orphism by Guillaume Apollinaire. From 1913-1920 Picabia and Duchamp with Man Ray were involved with the Dadaist movement. They instigated and participated in Dada shows in New York, Barcelona, Zurich, Berlin, Cologne, and Paris, creating scandals to promote their art. In 1918 a Dada show was attended by André Breton, Paul Éluard, and Louis Aragon, starting another round of cross-influence among several highly creative people. At that time Picabia was making hard, brassy pictures and picture-objects, proposing the machine as a model of human behavior. He humorously associated mechanistic forms with sexual allusions to produce shocking satires of bourgeois values. In 1921, Picabia finally quit Dada and returned to figurative art. He remained a highly individualistic figure in the art world of the 1920's. Picabia laughed at the Surrealist Manifesto by 'Andre Breton' and the Surrealists in the last issue of 391, a Dada magazine that he published until 1924. He quit publishing the magazine because for him, new technologies of cinema, the moving images, had opened an illusion-producing tool with a greater power than a still image. With the declaration of 'Instantaneism' Picabia transfered the spirit of Dada into another phase of artistic production involving the concepts of the machine, the speed, and the "now" as ways to change the norms and codes of social conventions. During the 1930s Picabia developed a close friendship with Gertrude Stein. At that time he was writing poetry and painted in an abstract style. He left Paris during the occupation in the Second World War, and lived in the south of France. By the end of WWII, he returned to Paris, and resumed painting and writing poetry. In 1949, he had a retrospective show of his works in Paris. Francis Picabia was known for his inventiveness, absurdist humour, and dis-concerning changes of style. He died on November 30, 1953, in Paris. A Picabia painting was recently sold for as much as $1.6 million. Francis Picabia claimed to prefer machines to the old world of sentiment. He inherited wealth, which bought him a major collection of automobiles and yachts. He owned as many as 160 vintage and rare cars. He was also involved in making exotic car designs and used some of his cars in films. In René Clair's Dada film Entr'acte (1924), Picabia is squeezed into a tiny Citroen together with composer Erik Satie.