“Francis Picabia: Late Paintings,”
at Michael Werner Gallery, New York.
April 12–June 10, 2000
Francis Picabia (1879–1953) embodied the spirit of eclecticism. An
inconstant, philandering lover of art, he had no respect or patience
for the integrity of artistic styles or for the ideologies that at
times generate them. During his first thirty years as a painter, he
moved restlessly from impressionism and postimpressionism through
fauvism, orphism, cubism, dada, and surrealism, after which he
skidded off on an idiosyncratic course that briefly visited many
styles without settling into any one of them. Today when we think
of him, it is the object portraits we tend to recall, those dadaist
mechanical drawings, based largely on American advertisements, from
the period 1915 to 1917. The late paintings, from the last thirty
years of Picabia’s life, which are on view in a grand, confusing,
though always exuberant show at Michael Werner’s new gallery, have
received scant attention, in part because they defy categorization.
Even to a generation weaned on the flitting allegiances of
postmodernism, the late work must seem impossibly broad, the
effusions of a man impassioned by a chaotic sensibility. These
paintings encompass abstraction, illustration, academic realism,
comic-book graphics, and a mélange of modernist styles, sometimes
mixing several in a single frame; they allude to Renaissance
painting, commercial art, naïve art, surrealism, and poster art,
among other visual cues.
Perhaps Picabia’s most enduring contribution from
this period is his method of overlaying or sandwiching images
in flat, legible