Savage Negation

Francis Picabia-Women with Bulldog 1941-1942

Francis Picabia constantly perplexes and undermines artistic expectations. A wealthy, hedonistic playboy with great personal charm, Picabia also possessed a notoriously acerbic wit and personified the savage negation at the heart of Dada.

Picabia’s career spanned many movements across continents, but is best remembered for his involvement with Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Arthur Craven in the creation of New York Dada and his mechanomorphic drawings from 1915 onwards. Always on the move and with entry to every fashionable social circle, Picabia moved to Barcelona then to Zurich for the remainder of WWI. Asked to describe his impressions of the War, Picabia remarked that he was bored to hell. After WWI he moved back to Paris and participated in further Dada shenanigans with Tristan Tzara and Andre Breton, contributing ferocious manifestos for Dada events which he watched from private boxes with the mistress of the time.

With a nature both aristocratic and anarchic, Picabia rapidly lost patience with the various groups and movements and would denounce Dada and later Surrealism. From 1925 he returned to painting with a vengeance after a ten year hiatus, working on the Transparencies series which involved multiple images confusingly superimposed. Then in the forties came the nudes copied from girlie mags; astonishingly unaesthetic, these paintings are so appalling that you cannot stop looking and in a certain respect represent the culmination of Picabia’s anti-art stance.

Dada Cannibalistic Manifesto

You are all indicted, stand up! It is impossible to talk to you unless you are standing up.
Stand up as you would for the Marseillaise or God Save the King.

Stand up, as if the Flag were before you. Or as if you were in the presence of Dada, which signifies Life, and which accuses you of loving everything out of snobbery if only it is expensive enough.

One dies a hero’s death or an idiot’s death – which comes to the same thing. The only word that has more than a day-to-day value is the word Death. You love death – the death of others.

Kill them! Let them die! Only money does not die; it only goes away for a little while.

That is God! That is someone to respect: someone you can take seriously! Money is the prie-Dieu of entire families. Money for ever! Long live money! The man who has money is a man of honour.

Honour can be bought and sold like the arse. The arse, the arse, represents life like potato-chips, and all you who are serious-minded will smell worse than cow’s shit.

Dada alone does not smell: it is nothing, nothing, nothing.
It is like your hopes: nothing
like your paradise: nothing
like your idols: nothing
like your heroes: nothing
like your artists: nothing
like your religions: nothing.

Hiss, shout, kick my teeth in, so what? I shall still tell you that you are half-wits. In three months my friends and I will be selling you our pictures for a few francs.

Francis Picabia 1920

Francis Picabia-Nude 1943

Francis Picabia-the Blonde and the Brunette

Francis-Picabia-The-woman-and-the-idol[1]

Francis Picabia-Nude 1940

Francis Picabia-Nude from Back 1944

Francis Picabia-The Women at the Sea

Francis Picabia-Two Women with Poppies 1944

A Penetrating Insight

Francis Picabia-Statices 1929

 

AAAAAhhhhhhhhhhhhh………..
………..yeaaaaaaaaaaaHHHHHH
Fuck aye.
The noo you know
The new for now
Oh no
No No NO…

What was that?
You want me to repeat myself?
You didn’t catch me the first time around
You couldn’t quite…understand?
Why, did I fucking st-st-ss-st-sh-st
Stir shutter st-stutter?
Maybe I did but maybe
You should pay attention

(is it for real is it for real)

And listen closely for once
Instead of just talking on and
On and over and on

(is it for real)

Droning on like a dazed wasp
Drunk on the sun and nectar
As for me, well I never could

(is it for real)

Help losing the run of myself
The raging nights eventually
Turned into days of anger
That summer of blissed love
Turning into a nuclear winter
Of seething hatefulness
I suppose we all see

(is it for real is it for real)

Things differently
With varying rates
Of absorption,
Insight and penetration;
Five minutes five days
Five years five aeons
But I think you need a break
Even God rested on the Sabbath
Yeah a change will do you good
So do us all a favour,
Don’t be a cunt all your life
Take that vacation, starting now.

Now I know this shit is for real
Definitely maybe probably
Decidedly so I know the score
This is the deal I’ve be waiting for

(but is it really for real for real for real)

aaaaaHHHHHHHHHHHH………..
………YEAAAAAAAAAAAhhhhhh
Fuck aye
The noo you know
The new for now
And aye
Aye Aye AYE

The Colossus of Dada

Arthur Cravan

Arthur Cravan remains an elusive figure. A tireless self-promoter he caused a scandal and generated legends wherever he landed up and as he led a wandering peripatetic existence this meant he was infamous on both sides of the Atlantic. However what is not in doubt is that his exploits were an inspiration to the Dada movements in Europe and New York, leading to his canonisation by the Surrealists.

Born in Lausanne, Switzerland he had fond memories of his uncle, Oscar Wilde, ‘I adored him because he resembled a huge beast’ (he later perpetuated a hoax in his self-published magazine Maintenant in 1913 that he had recently had met up with Wilde, that was taken up by The New York Times; Wilde had been dead for over a decade). He was expelled from an English boarding school for spanking his teacher, certainly not the last of his anarchic provocations. He travelled throughout Europe on documents and passports he had forged himself and could convincingly pass himself off as German, French, English or Swiss depending on the locale. While in Paris he give an announcement that he would hold a talk which would culminate in his suicide. When the hall filled up in expectation he then accursed the spectators of vulgar voyeurism and proceeded to bore them with a lecture on entropy instead. Proud of his imposing physique (he was 6’4) and his boxing prowess he managed to become the French Heavyweight Champion without winning a single fight and would later go on to fight the World Champion Jack Johnson in the Canary Islands. He lasted a respectable six rounds although Johnson later noted in his autobiography that Cravan seemed out of training.

Dodging the draft he went to New York, where through the agency of Francis Picarbia, his partner-in-crime from his Barcelona days he fraternized with the future Dadaists Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray and would meet his future wife Mina Loy, who nick-named him Colossus. While in New York Cravan also indulged his taste for provocation; upon giving a lecture on humour he turned up dead drunk and proceeded to strip while berating the crowd, the police were promptly called and he was dragged off to the cells.

To once again  avoid military service Cravan and Loy went to Mexico where they were married. As I  wrote in my previous post  Surrealist Women: Mina Loy, Cravan set off in his small sailing boat never to be seen again, leading to all sorts of rumours and reported sightings, further sealing the legend of the anarchic poet-boxer provocateur.

Spanish Night

Francis Picabia-La Nuit Espagnole 1922

1922’s La Nuit Espagnole (Spanish Night) marks the return to a more  figurative approach for the mercurial Francis Picabia (see FOR-EVER) after a decade of experimentation with Orphism, Cubism, Proto-Dada and Dada. The previous year Picabia had broken with Dada after producing a violently anti-Dada manifesto, and he moved closer to the group gathered around Andre Breton. However such an anarchic spirit couldn’t ever be tethered down to any particular movement for long, and in 1924 he turned his back on the art world altogether, though he continued to paint in a bewildering array of styles for a number of decades.

Showing the influence of commercial illustration and graphic design, Picabia painted La Nuit Espagnole using black and white enamel paint. A silhouette of a devilish flamenco dancer approaches a naked women with suggestive targets areas reminiscent of De Chirico, who on occasion painted concentric circles on his figures (see Premonition). Both figures appear to be riddled with bullet holes. A striking painting by the most debonair, cynical and acerbic of Modern artists.

FOR-EVER

Young American Girl In A State Of Nudity-Francis Picabia 1915

A cynical statement on the mechanization of desire and sexuality, Francis Picabia’s Proto-Dada illustration was first published in Alfred Stieglitz’s magazine 291. Employing the style of commercial graphics found in trade magazines to downplay any notion of a highbrow and bourgeois art, the line drawing of a spark plug takes on a new meaning with the deeply ironical title.