Francis Picabia (Paris, France, 1879 – Paris, France, 1953) moved through more styles and convictions than perhaps any other artist of his generation, treating reinvention itself, and even outright contradiction, as his one consistent principle.
Trained at the École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, Picabia began as a competent Impressionist before working rapidly through Cubism and toward abstraction in the years before the First World War. His 1913 trip to New York for the Armory Show brought him into the orbit of the photographer and dealer Alfred Stieglitz, whose gallery, 291, gave an early audience to Picabia's mechanomorphic drawings, among them Very Rare Picture on the Earth (1915), satirical portraits and relationships rendered as diagrams of pistons, spark plugs, and machine parts that reduced human intimacy and failure to the malfunction of an engine. Picabia became a central, itinerant figure of Dada, shuttling between New York, Zurich, and Barcelona and founding and editing the journal 391, a needling echo of Stieglitz's own magazine. His close, often fractious friendship with Marcel Duchamp shaped both artists throughout these years.
Picabia's restlessness never settled. In the 1920s he moved through the layered, superimposed compositions of his Transparencies series before startling even his own admirers in the late 1920s and 1930s with deliberately kitsch figurative paintings, many copied directly from Spanish postcards and pin-up photography rather than invented; the challenge of these works lay less in their bad taste than in Picabia's refusal of originality itself, at a moment when modernism expected each artist to arrive at one recognizable, consistent style. In his final years he returned once more to pure abstraction, closing a career that had passed through nearly every major movement of the previous four decades without settling permanently into any of them.
Largely dismissed by the end of his life, Picabia has since been recognized as one of the twentieth century's most prescient innovators, anticipating strategies of appropriation and stylistic refusal that later artists would treat as deliberate methods rather than failures of commitment. His work is held today in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
