Francis Picabia

During this period, Picabia likewise solidified his commitment to a core method that had persisted through all his previous stylistic transformations. He continued to extract and repurpose pre-existing visual material from a vast collection of images, and from his own earlier paintings. Extensive archival research and recent X-ray imaging have revealed that Picabia would frequently paint over existing works, concealing mechanomorphic designs from his dada period, ‘Transparencies’ from the late 1920s and even his latest abstractions beneath new compositions.

By merging discrete references and artistic traditions, Picabia developed visual and symbolic languages that were entirely novel. Art historians have directly attributed motifs in ‘Le U’ (1950), ‘Villejuif [I]’ (1951) and ‘La terre est ronde (The Earth is Round)’ (1951)—among other paintings on view in this exhibition—to Picabia’s frequent use of a catalogue documenting Romanesque art from Catalonia, published by Barcelona’s municipal museum in 1926. The composition of ‘La terre est ronde (The Earth is Round)’ (1951), for example, adapts key forms from an illustration in a tenth century illuminated manuscript depicting an angel of the biblical apocalypse, that was reproduced in the Barcelona museum’s 1926 catalogue. In Picabia’s rendition, the multicolored circles suspended in air and arrayed on the ground around the central figure ally this more representational work with the artist’s ‘dot’ paintings. Picabia also appropriated from text, often drawing on Nietzsche for his titles, as seen here in ‘Cherchez d’abord votre Orphée ! (First Seek Your Orpheus!)’ (1948) and ‘Bonheur de l’aveuglement (Joy of Blindness)’ (c. 1946–1947), both inspired by passages in ‘The Gay Science’ (1882).

Energized by neo-dadaist tendencies and an interest in prehistoric European cave art, Picabia became increasingly attentive to the materiality and surface texture of his late paintings. Indeterminate matter—like the thick impasto that calcifies the surface of ‘Composition’ (1947)—was thought to reveal the limits of descriptive language. It was under the aegis of dadaism, too, that Picabia debuted his infamous ‘point’ or ‘dot’ paintings at the Galerie des Deux-Îles in December 1949. With works such as ‘Le Ciel (The Sky)’ (1949) and ‘Symbole (Symbol)’ (1950), Picabia reduced painting to its barest elements (figure and ground), dispersing autonomous circles of color across turbulent and chasmic monochrome surfaces. Though Picabia’s ‘dot’ paintings were decried by some for being repetitious, the art critic and painter Michel Seuphor praised them as a resounding ‘end point’ in the history of painting. For Picabia, they represented another departure, one more new beginning.

As a complement to this exhibition, Hauser & Wirth Publishers has released a fully illustrated catalogue with fresh scholarship in both English and French on Picabia’s late work. The publication features an introductory preface by Beverley Calté, and essays by art historians Arnauld Pierre and Candace Clements. It contextualizes Picabia’s position within a vibrant postwar Parisian art scene, and among a group of gestural abstract painters who were collectively identified as the art informel movement.