Francis Picabia. Machines and Spanish Women

“Picabia’s artistic career is a kaleidoscopic series of experiences.” Marcel Duchamp

Francis Picabia (Paris, 1879-1953) was an impetuous non-conformist and these very characteristics define his entire career, giving it a quality of constant renewal. Picabia was a versatile artist, always seeking change, capable of making a 180° turn in his life or work as soon as he had reached whatever goal he had set for himself. Post-impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Dadaism and Surrealism: one after another he embraced all these movements, only to reject them later.

A wanderer, Picabia lived in Paris, New York, Barcelona, Zurich. The accumulation of tendencies and cultures acquired at various periods in his life translated to an oeuvre that is defined by the antagonisms that co-exist within it. The cross-cultural experience and polymorphism are the mainsprings of Francis Picabia’s art and literature.

The idea of Spain as a melting pot is intrinsic to Picabia’s life and work and is the leitmotif of this exhibition. He saw Spain as a place where anything could happen, where everything converges to produce flourishing species of hybrids. Picabia believed that Spain brought together a variety of often opposing elements, causing them ultimately to flow together and merge in an utterly natural fashion. Here figurative painting with its dream-like roots lived side by side with experimental abstract art and avant-garde poetry. For Picabia, Spain was not just an iconographic reference, but also a source of exoticism and vitality and, above all, an ideal setting for contradiction: a mythical country where machines, Españolas and toreros could all appear.

Picabia’s links to Barcelona were particularly close and the city was a key destination in his creative wanderings. In 1915 and 1916, when Europe was in the midst of war, Picabia, like many other creative people, went into voluntary exile in Barcelona. The first four issues of his review 391 and the book of poems Cinquante-deux miroirs were all published here. In 1922 he exhibited a series of “machines and Españolas” at the Galeries Dalmau. He became yet more closely identified with Barcelona when Dau al Set dedicated a special issue to him on the occasion of his death in 1953.

The 150 works included in the exhibition Francis Picabia. Machines and españolas are divided into five sections, according to the most significant periods of Picabia’s production: early abstracts with their Cubist and Futurist influences; the period just after the outbreak of World War I, when Picabia adopted the principles of Dadaism and went on to become one of the movement’s most prominent figures; the early 1920s, marked by his exhibition at Barcelona’s Galeries Dalmau where he combined his mechanomorphous drawings (machines) with portraits of Españolas; the period following his break with the Surrealist movement when his work had a particularly transparent quality and began to be peopled by “monsters,” and lastly the “popular realism,” interest in figurative art, Spanish subjects and the latest in abstract art that marked the final period of his life.

The lavishly illustrated exhibition catalogue contains essays by Maria Lluïsa Borràs, William A. Camfield, Jean-Jacques Lebel and Annette Michelson. It is further enhanced by a facsimile edition of the catalogue published for his 1922 exhibition at Galeries Dalmau and includes the preface by André Breton who once wrote that “Paris is bigger than Picabia, but Picabia is the capital of Paris.”