FRANCIS PICABIA (FRANÇOIS MARIE MARTÍNEZ PICABIA)
París,(France) 1879 –París (France) 1953  

He studied at the École des Arts Décoratifs, not without some reservations on the part of the well-off members of the family circle. The friendship that he established with the Pissarro family in 1902 led to the adoption of an open-air approach and the development of a heterodox Impressionism that was a great success in the official French Salons and certain circuits in Germany and Britain. In 1908, however, he broke away from them after being introduced to Gabrielle Buffet’s “theories of correspondence”. Contact with Duchamp and Apollinaire and the Sunday discussions at Puteaux alligned him with the supporters of a new aesthetics that went beyond Cubism. In the Salon de la Section d’Or in 1912 he presented various works that suggested the radically abstract line adopted by him after his visit to the United States in connection with the Armory Show. This approach became more systematic in the “psychological studies” that he began to produce in 1914. The war drove him back to America, where he made his first “anti-drawings” (machine-portraits and mechanical works). In 1916 he reduced his production of visual work but not his activity as a poet, which he intensified, nor his activity as a publisher, which he developed in the United States, Barcelona (where he published 391) and Zürich. In 1919 he caused a scandal with the “machines” exhibited at the Salon d’Automne. This was a forerunner to the events that took place when he activated the Paris faction of Dadaism, together with Tzara and Breton.

In 1922 he went back to figurative painting. In the last issue of 391 he formulated Instantaneism, with which he wished to keep the spirit of Dada alive. He gave physical expression to it in a ballet (Relâche, with the collaboration of Erik Satie and Jean Börlin), a film (Entr’acte, with René Clair and Satie) and an entertainment (Ciné-Sketch). In 1925 he moved to the French Riviera, where he became an irreverent enlivener of high society and translated instantaneism into pictorial form in various series that borrowed their iconography from the history of art and mythology –Monstres (Monsters), 1925, Transparences (Transparencies), 1927-33- and allegories. He ended his figurative stage during the years of the Second World War with a series of ambiguous, photo-realistic Nus (Nudes), which have been interpreted as forerunners of Pop Art.

After the war he returned to Paris, where he went back to the paths of abstraction, through which he became involved with the artists of psychological non-figuration. In 1949 he received a great tribute at the retrospective exhibition 50 ans de plaisir, held at the Galerie René Drouin in Paris.