Francis Picabia

Francis Picabia, born Francois Marie Martinez Picabia in Paris on January 22, 1879, to a Spanish father and French mother, was a French painter, writer, and poet among the protagonists of the 20th-century avant-gardes. Attending the Ecole des Arts Decoratifs in Paris from 1895 to 1897 and studying with masters like Albert Charles Wallet, Ferdinand Humbert, and Fernand Cormon, he began his artistic career in 1902-1903 adopting an Impressionist style influenced by Camille Pissarro and Alfred Sisley, exhibiting at the Salon d'Automne and Salon des Independents and holding his first solo show at Galerie Haussmann in 1905. From 1908 he incorporated elements of Fauvism, Neo-Impressionism, Cubism, and abstraction, developing from 1912 a personal synthesis that led him to work abstractly until the early Twenties, forging friendships with Marcel Duchamp, Guillaume Apollinaire, and the Puteaux group.

In the 1910s Picabia frequently moved to New York, introducing modern art to the United States with his proto-Dada 'mechanical portraits,' ironic works of metal tangles representing the crisis of figurative language. Between 1916 and 1917 in Barcelona he created Dadaist works, poetry, and literature, founding the magazine 391 and joining Tristan Tzara's Swiss group, exhibiting at the Salon d'Automne. In 1924 he attacked Andre Breton and the Surrealists in his magazine, returning to figurative art with vivid Fauvist colors after moving to Mougins in 1925, and in the Thirties became friends with Gertrude Stein. During World War II he produced glamour nudes inspired by French women's magazines, then returned to Paris at the war's end, influenced by Matta, Soulages, and Hartung, resuming abstraction and poetry.

In the Forties he painted sur-irrealist series like 'Je ne veux plus peindre' and 'Tu ne le vendras jamais,' culminating in 1949 with a retrospective at Galerie Rene Drouin in Paris. Francis Picabia died in Paris on November 30, 1953, leaving a chameleonic legacy spanning Impressionism, Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism, and Abstraction, making him an icon of the avant-gardes. His works are today featured in prestigious auctions like those of Pandolfini, a renowned auction house for modern and contemporary art.