Francis Picabia

The French avant-garde painter Francis Picabia (1879–1953) was one of the great innovators of 20th-century modernism, with a career defined by his restless, visionary approach. In 1945 he settled permanently in Paris and in his final years returned to abstract painting. This book delves into Picabia’s practice between the years 1945 and 1953—an incredibly rich yet largely unknown period during which Picabia created paintings unlike anything he had produced before. Essays by art historian Arnauld Pierre and scholar Candace Clements shed new light on the hidden signs and symbols buried in his abstractions, the new painting techniques he employed, and the mysterious and fantastical reappearance of the "dot" in his work. Eternal Beginning is an essential resource, marking the first in-depth exploration of a crucial period in Picabia’s practice.

In the 1950s, American painter Philip Pearlstein (1924–2022) completed his MA thesis, “The Paintings of Francis Picabia 1908–1930.” When his research coincided with Picabia’s death in 1953, Pearlstein briefly became the authority on Picabia and his influence, writing three subsequent essays: “The Symbolic Language of Francis Picabia” for Arts magazine (1956); “Hello & Goodbye, Francis Picabia” for Art News (1970); and “When the Dada Daddies Got Real, or How I Turned Picabia Inside Out” for Brooklyn Rail (2017). Pearlstein’s articles present a fascinating comparison between Picabia, Duchamp and Pearlstein himself.
Picabia Inside Out brings together Pearlstein’s articles in full, including a facsimile of the 1955 MA thesis presented as a historical document showing all the nuances of his typewriter. A foreword by Robert Storr highlights Pearlstein's importance as a precursor to what became known as postmodernism.
Philip Pearlstein (born 1924) is an American painter best known for his modernist realist nudes. Pearlstein has written many articles for major art journals, and his contribution to contemporary art is acknowledged by his many awards and honors.

Limited to 500 copies, Litterature pairs excerpts from Francis Picabia’s (1879–1953) novel Caravanserail with nine drawings and seventeen studies he created for the cover of André Breton’s Litterature journal between 1922 and 1924. This beautifully produced linen-bound book—whose front cover features circular die-cuts derived from one of Picabia’s dice drawings—offers a celebration of subversive play and fluid forms.

Irreverent and audacious, restless and brilliant, Francis Picabia achieved fame as a leader of the Dada group only to break publicly with the movement in 1921. Moving between Paris, the French Riviera, Switzerland, and New York, he led a dashing life, painting, writing, yachting, gambling, racing fast cars, and organizing lavish parties. Like no other artist before him, Picabia created a body of work that defies consistency and categorization, from Impressionist landscapes to abstraction, from Dada to stylized nudes, and from performance and film to poetry and publishing. A primary constant in his career was his vigorous unpredictability.

Illustrated with nearly 500 reproductions, this sweeping survey of Picabia's eclectic career embraces the challenge of his work, asking how we can make sense of its wildly shifting mediums and styles. In her opening essay, curator Anne Umland writes that with Picabia, familiar oppositions "between high art and kitsch, progression and regression, modernism and its opposite, and success and failure are undone."

In 15 superb essays, additional authors—including distinguished professors George Baker, Briony Fer, and David Joselit and renowned Picabia scholars Carole Boulbès and Arnauld Pierre—delve into the radically various mediums, styles, and contexts of Picabia's work, discussing his Dada period, his abstractions, his mechanical paintings, his appropriations of source imagery, his multifaceted relationship with print (both in his paintings and as a publisher and contributor to vanguard journals), his forays into screenwriting and theater, and his complex politics. Marcel Duchamp, of course, but also Nietzsche and Gertrude Stein make repeat appearances along the way.

Turning to Picabia's contemporary legacy, Cathérine Hug maps the history of his critical reception and interviews contemporary curators and artists, including Peter Fischli, Albert Oehlen, and David Salle. A lively 30-page chronology illustrated with archival photographs and ephemera gives readers a year-by-year account of the artist's colorful life and of his interactions with fellow artists and critics, friends, and lovers.

Together these essays suggest that the unruly genius of Picabia offers us a powerfully relevant and provocative alternative to the familiar narrative of modernism.

Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round So Our Thoughts Can Change Direction accompanies the major 2016 exhibition on the artist, jointly organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Kunsthaus Zürich.

Francis Picabia was born in 1879 in Paris, the only child of a Cuban-born Spanish father and a French mother. His first success came as a painter in an Impressionist manner. He went on to become one of the principle figures of the Dada movement in New York and Paris. In 1925 Picabia moved to the south of France, where he lived and worked through World War II. Following the war, Picabia returned to Paris, where he died in 1953.

Anne Umland is the Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Cathérine Hug is Curator, 20th Century Art at the Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland.