Francis Picabia | XXe | Francis Picabia (339 pictures)

Francis Picabia (French: Francisco Maria Martinez Picabia della Torre; full name Francisco Maria Martinez Picabia della Torre; January 22, 1879, Paris - November 30, 1953, Paris) was a French avant-garde artist, graphic artist and writer-publicist. Francis Picabia gained fame as an eccentric artist who did not obey any political or stylistic dogma. He had a great influence on modern art, in particular on Dada and surrealism.

Born in Paris on January 22, 1879 in the family of a Cuban diplomat; his mother was French.
As an artist, he had a rather modest talent, but his energetic and restless character ensured him an important role in such movements as cubism, Dada and surrealism, and with his publications the artist contributed to the spread of avant-garde ideas.
Picabia was rich enough and could do what he loved without worrying about making money. Francis's father was an attaché at the Cuban diplomatic mission in Paris. Picabia studied at the School of Fine Arts and the School of Decorative Arts.
At the beginning of his career, he painted landscapes in the impressionist style and had considerable success. From 1903 to 1908 he was influenced by the impressionist Alfred Sisley.

In 1908-1909 he experimented with Neo-Impressionism and then with Fauvism and Cubism. Around 1911 he joined the Puteaux group, which met in the studio of Jacques Villon in the village of Poutois. In 1911, Picabia met with Marcel Duchamp, who had a great influence on his work, and began preaching Orphism with him.

Picabia began writing his first purely abstract works in 1912. In 1913, he went to New York to present Cubism at the famous Gun Show. After returning to Paris in 1915-16, he, Duchamp and Man Ray participated in the birth of a new movement - Dada.
After moving to Barcelona (where he lived in 1916-17), Picabia founded the magazine "391" (1917-1924 gg.), in 1917 he went to New York for six months and then went to Zurich (1918-19), where he helped spread Dadaism, after which he returned to Paris.
However, in 1921 he considered this movement outdated, becoming interested in the ideas of the emerging surrealism of Andre Breton, but in 1924 he moved away from him, although some of his later works were written using the figurative language of surrealism. In 1925 he returned to figurative painting.
In the 1930s he became a close friend of Gertrude Stein.

From 1925 to 1945 he lived in the south of France, on the Cote d'Azur, experimenting with various styles. In the early 1940s, his work took a surprising turn - he produced a series of paintings based on nude photographs and photographs from the French magazine "Girlie", in an edgy style that subverted traditional, academic nude painting. Before the end of World War II, in 1945, Picabia settled in Paris and at the end of his creative career returned to abstract painting and poetry. Picabia was published in avant-garde magazines, published pamphlets and wrote poetry. He was the author of the fantasy ballet "Respite" (1924) with music by Erik Satie and the film "Intermission" (directed by Rene Clair), which was shown during the intermission between the two acts of the ballet. Picabia had numerous affairs with the ballerinas he painted. He was very fond of fast driving and cars; his collection included 150 cars.

The most prized paintings are those of Picabia, in which mechanical and biomorphic forms are combined in dynamic compositions. The most famous of them is “I Remember Again My Dear Ondine” (1914, Museum of Modern Art, New York). It is an ode to the ballerina with whom Picabia also had an affair.

Francis Picabia died in Paris in 1953 and was interred in the Montmartre cemetery.