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.