Francis Picabia

Francis Picabia (: born Francis-Marie Martinez de Picabia; 22January 1879 – 30November 1953) was a French avant-garde painter, writer, filmmaker, magazine publisher, poet, and typographist closely associated with Dada.

When considering the many styles that Picabia painted in, observers have described his career as "shape-shifting" or "kaleidoscopic".

After experimenting with Impressionism and Pointillism, Picabia became associated with Cubism.

His highly abstract planar compositions were colourful and rich in contrasts.

His birth year of 1879 coincided with the Spanish-Cuban Little War; and though Picabia was born in Paris, his father was involved in Cuban-French relations and would later serve as attaché at the Cuban legation in Paris (see the Treaty of 1898).

The family ties to Cuba would be important in Picabia's life later on.

The family was affluent, and both parents encouraged Picabia to pursue an art career.

Picabia's mother died of tuberculosis when he was five, and he was raised by his father.

Picabia's artistic ability was apparent from his youth.

During the late 1890s, Picabia began to study art under Fernand Cormon and others at École des Arts Decoratifs, Cormon's academy at 104 boulevard de Clichy, where Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec had also studied.

He studied under Fernand Cormon, Ferdinand Humbert, and Albert Charles Wallet for two years.

From the age of twenty, Picabia lived by painting.

Subsequently, he inherited money from his mother, leaving him far wealthier than most of his contemporaries in the art world.

He began buying at least one new sports car each year, and ultimately owned 127 over the course of his life.

In 1894, he copied a collection of Spanish paintings that belonged to his grandfather, switching the copies for the originals and selling the originals to finance his stamp collection.

A lifelong philanderer, Picabia eloped to Switzerland in 1897 with one of his mistresses, causing his father to briefly cut off contact with him.

Early in his career, from 1903 to 1908, Picabia was influenced by the Impressionist paintings of Alfred Sisley.

His subject matter included small churches, lanes, roofs of Paris, riverbanks, wash houses, and barges.

This led critics to question his originality, saying that he copied Sisley, that his cathedrals looked like Monet cathedrals, or that he painted like Signac.

He soon came to feel he was working in an outdated style and began to look for a new approach.

From 1909, his style changed as he came under the influence of a group of artists soon to be called Cubists.

These artists would later form the Golden Section (Section d'Or).

The same year, Picabia married Gabrielle Buffet.

Around 1911 Picabia joined the Puteaux Group, whose members he had met at the studio of Jacques Villon in Puteaux, a commune in the western suburbs of Paris.

There he became friends with artist Marcel Duchamp and close friends with Guillaume Apollinaire.

Other group members included Albert Gleizes, Roger de La Fresnaye, Fernand Léger and Jean Metzinger.

In 1913, the Association of American Painters and Sculptors held the first major show of modernist art in New York City, which would become known as the Armory Show.

The wealthy Picabia was the only member of the Cubist group to personally attend the Armory Show, as the others could not afford to do so, and he also contributed four paintings.

The American press was largely hostile to the show, describing it as bizarre or deviant, but Picabia was widely interviewed and discussed as the only representative of the movement available.

He immediately became a major name in New York's artistic circles.

Avant-garde art dealer Alfred Stieglitz also gave Picabia a solo show, Exhibition of New York studies by Francis Picabia, at his gallery 291 (formerly Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession), 17 March – 5 April 1913.

There, Picabia displayed work that he had created in the past few months in New York.

Influenced by abstract art from the Armory Show such as that of Wassily Kandinsky, he was now creating abstract works of his own.

When he returned to Paris in April 1913, he formally broke with the Cubists.

From 1913 to 1915 Picabia traveled to New York City several times.

He was one of the early major figures of the Dada movement in the United States and in France before denouncing it in 1921.

He was later briefly associated with Surrealism, but would soon turn his back on the art establishment.

Francis Picabia was born in Paris of a French mother and a Cuban father of Spanish descent.

Some sources would have his father as of aristocratic Spanish descent, whereas others consider him of non-aristocratic Spanish descent, from the region of Galicia.

(They would divorce in 1930.)