Throughout his long career, Francis Picabia (Paris, 1879 – Paris, 1963) experimented with most of the artistic movements of his time. Following the premature death of his mother and maternal grandmother, he was raised in an all-male household with his father, uncle, and grandfather, where drawing and painting seemed to be the only remedy against solitude.
In 1895, Picabia began studying at the École des Arts Décoratifs, where he was a student of Fernand Cormon, Ferdinand Humbert, and Albert Charles Wallet, and where he met, among others, Georges Braque. Four years later, he debuted at the Salon des Artistes Français with the painting Une rue aux Martigues.
Starting in 1902, Picabia came under the influence of landscape painters like Pissarro and Sisley, which led him toward Impressionism. He exhibited at the Salon d’Automne and the Salon des Indépendants, as well as at the Berthe Weill Gallery, before signing a contract with the prestigious Galerie Haussmann, which held his first solo exhibition in 1905. In this phase, Picabia’s Impressionism took on Symbolist tones typical of the late 19th century. Art was not seen as mere reproduction of nature, but as the result of the artist’s observational and emotional experience, with shapes and colors combined based on a deeply personal response. However, just when his reputation seemed to be gaining stability, Picabia turned toward Abstraction, first producing a couple of drawings in 1908 and then Caoutchouc in 1909.
Between 1909 and 1914, he explored various avant-garde movements—Fauvism, Futurism, Cubism, and Orphism—in search of a personal language. At the 1911 Salon, he exhibited Printemps and Adam et Ève, while the following year he presented more abstract works such as Tarantelle, Port de Naples, Danses à la Source I, La Source, and Procession à Séville.
In 1913, Picabia traveled to New York for the Armory Show, where he exhibited four paintings created the previous year: Danses à la Source I, Procession à Séville, Paris, and Souvenir d’Italie. What was meant to be a two-week trip turned into a six-month stay. There, he met photographer Alfred Stieglitz and exhibited watercolors at the 291 Gallery. The city had a profound impact on him: modern and defined by mechanical and industrial revolution, Picabia saw New York as the only truly Futurist city, where modern thought and feeling had become incarnate in architecture and daily life. This new wave of inspiration led to works such as Danseuse étoile sur un Transatlantique, Chanson nègre, and New York.
At the beginning of World War I, Picabia was sent on a mission to Cuba, which he soon abandoned to return to New York. That same year, in an article published by the New York Tribune, he reiterated his “mechanomorphic” interests, viewing machines not just as tools but as integral to human life. He also published a series of object-portraits in the magazine 291, such as Le portrait d’une Jeune fille américaine and Fille née sans mère.
In 1916, he exhibited Très rare tableau sur la terre, Machine sans nom, and Voilà la femme at the Modern Gallery. The following year, he published his first poetry book, Cinquante-deux miroirs, and launched the Dada magazine 391, which would last seven years with nineteen issues. He continued writing even during a therapeutic stay in Switzerland, producing Poèmes et dessins de la fille née sans mère, L’athlète des pompes funèbres, and Râteliers platoniques.
In 1919, Picabia fully embraced the mature French version of Dada. At this point, the artist turned every form of belief and thought into something to be mocked—and simultaneously resisted. Religion, nationalism, the bourgeoisie, and even other artists were derided. Picabia positioned himself as both anti-bourgeois and anti-communist. He wrote for Littérature, André Breton’s magazine, as well as for Revue Dada and 391. He also published Pensées sans langage and exhibited works like L’enfant carburateur and Parade amoureuse—mechano-inspired paintings—at the Salon d’Automne. Fully Dada works such as Double monde, La Sainte Vierge, and Portrait de Cézanne date to 1920.
In the mid-1920s, Picabia moved to the French Riviera. In 1924, he began his Monstres series—caricatures of subjects inspired by old masters like Rubens, Dürer, and Michelangelo. By 1927, he had bid farewell to Dada, which he viewed as “a return to reason.”
From the late 1920s to the early 1930s, he entered a phase of “neo-romantic transparencies,” with works inspired by Renaissance figures such as Sandro Botticelli and Piero della Francesca, classical statuary, mythology, and the Bible—sometimes even purely invented subjects. These works were first shown in 1928 at Galerie Théophile Briant in Paris.
In 1930, Léonce Rosenberg organized the first retrospective of Picabia’s work in Paris: 30 ans de peinture. In 1935, he exhibited for the first time in Chicago, presenting new works that continued the transparent style but with a more allegorical and neoclassical flavor. The 1930s also saw Picabia revisiting earlier explorations—landscapes, Fauvism, and geometric abstraction—in a whirlwind of styles that refused to settle into a definitive form.
In the 1940s, he turned toward realism and academic painting, producing works such as Femmes au bull-dog, Femme au serpent, Montparnasse, Deux nus, Adoration du veau, and Pierrot pendu. In 1945, Picabia returned to Paris. He developed a personal form of abstraction and regularly exhibited in city galleries and at avant-garde salons such as the Salon des Surindépendants and the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles. Works from this time include Bal Nègre, Danger de la force, Bonheur de l’aveuglement, and Kalinga. In 1949, Galerie René Drouin organized another monumental retrospective: 50 ans de plaisir.
Encouraged by friends and driven by insatiable curiosity, Picabia created a new series in his final years called Points, first exhibited in 1949 at Galerie des Deux Îles. Exhibitions continued throughout the 1950s in France, New York, and Brussels.
In 1951, he produced his last paintings—Tableau vivant, Villejuif, and La terre est ronde—which were exhibited the following year at Galerie Colette Allendy.
