This exhibition charts the full obstreperous,
unruly arc of Francis Picabia's career.
And I think it's very fair to say that unlike
his peers and contemporaries Pablo Picasso
or Marcel Duchamp, the two most prominent
examples, Francis Picabia is far from a household
name.
We very much wanted to present every significant
phase of his incredibly varied and heterogeneous
practice.
He began, and the works in this early little
section, as a sort of “johnny-come-lately”
after the fact Impressionist.
Unlike the original Impressionists working
in the 1860s and '70s, Picabia did not take
his canvases outside and set them up in nature.
He worked from photo mechanical reproductions,
from things like photographs or postcards.
They were critically praised, shown all over
the place, blah, blah, blah, but they also
introduce him as an appropriation artist
avant les lettres, and this whole idea of
the way that you can make art new by copying,
reproducing, replicating is a through line
in the practice and something we wanted to
set up at the start.
In 1913, Picabia visited New York City for
the first time and he was the only one of
the European avant-garde artists included
in the Armory Exhibition to cross the Atlantic
for that show.
He became rather rapidly the leading spokesperson
for the European avant-garde on American shores.
He went back to Europe in 1913, buoyed by
the success of this voyage, filled with confidence
and set out to paint what I think are really
a manifesto pair of abstractions.
He really is looking to the vocabularies of
other disciplines, like dance or like music,
to arrive at a nonrepresentational language.
The one on the left has the nonsensical title
"Edtaonisl."
You can see it inscribed up in the upper right
corner.
And the one on the right, Picabia titled "Udnie,"
which you see in the center on the upper edge.
For a curator to get these two works is a
really hard thing to do.
One is from Chicago, one's from Paris.
So it is...I think it's fair to say you won't
see them together again in our lifetime.
He doesn't fit a conventional mold, and he
allows, I think, you to narrate an alternative
history of what modern art could be, and one
that's more open ended, that allows for abstraction
or figuration or publishing or poetry or conceptual
art, just in this incredibly open ended way.
We wanted every room to respond to the different
character of the works being presented.
And this gallery space, with its funny carpets,
and its painted black stripe on the wall is
an homage to an installation that Picabia
did in Barcelona, in 1922.
So we're looking ahead to his work
the "Animal Trainer" from 1923, which definitely
takes pointed aim at Neo-classical figuration
and at the whole valorization of Ingres' sinuous
line.
But Picabia flattens that out.
He makes it into nothing more than a silhouette
or almost a stencil-like type of image.
Right, I know, I’m skipping all the truly
scary ones.
Like that clown, who’s scary.
Isn’t he?
“The Cacodylic Eye.”
As with those big abstractions we looked at,
Picabia has again done us the favor of writing
the title right up there at the top.
And that is one of the only things in this
picture that comes from Picabia's hand.
The other is that he signed it for us down
here, and he collaged in a little picture
of his face.
You can see that right there.
And he added the date, 1921.
But everything else on this surface that looks
for all the world like a graffitied wall,
or it certainly does to me, were added by
friends of Picabia.
In 1921, in the spring, Picabia got an eye
infection.
He was laid up in bed, he couldn't go outside.
He began this canvas.
And then anyone who came to visit him, he
invited them to contribute to it.
So what you have is a work that, on the one
hand, is this very iconoclastic group portrait
of the Parisian avant-garde, at a certain
moment.
It also, I think, is a work that so undoes
conventional notions of authorship, or what
is beauty.
Right?
What can beauty be, and could beauty be found
in something like a scribbled-on canvas
We get to figure it out along with him.
And maybe that's another thing that excited
me about him as a subject or about the show,
because it's not resolved.
