The only son of a Spanish aristocrat and a French woman from the bourgeoisie, Francis Picabia quickly lost his mother, his grandmother and then his father and evolved in a masculine universe. He then takes refuge in art. History has it that he found himself in confrontation with his grandfather who predicted the end of pictorial art, precipitated by photography. To his grandfather, the young Picabia answers “You want to photograph a landscape, but not the ideas I have in my head, we will make paintings that will not imitate nature”. In 1895, he enters the decorative arts where he integrates the promotion of Marie Laurencin and Georges Braque. He quickly exhibited at the official Salons, initially following the precepts of the Impressionists. It was in 1909 that Picabia broke, albeit abruptly, with Impressionist conformism and with his merchants when he exhibited Caoutchouc. The breach towards abstraction was opened, but Picabia would not really rush into it until a few years later. With a very personal cubist expression, Picabia sets out in search of the representation of all possible movements of the soul and spirit. Although this was a fruitful period in terms of inspiration for the artist, the galleries and art critics who had greeted him during his Impressionist period now turned their backs on him.
It was not until 1913, when Picabia went to New York as Europe’s ambassador to the Armory Show (the international modern art exhibition) that he regained the success to which he had become accustomed. He stays six months in a city that deeply marks him in his conception of modernity and where he definitively establishes his success. On his return he took part in the Dadaist adventures, temporarily, alongside Breton and Tzara.
Insatiable and in search of constant renewal, Picabia settles for twenty years in Cannes, acquires the famous Château de Mai where he is certainly working at full speed, but above all seems to bring his stylistic and technical investigations to a climax: it is time for transparencies, inspired by Spanish watercolours painted a few years earlier.
From 1940 onwards, financial difficulties made Picabia forget the prosperous years he had known. These are also the years of the return to abstraction, where sexual symbols become predominant in a more or less latent way. When he died in 1953, André Breton paid him a last tribute on December 4th, at the Montmartre cemetery: “Francis… your painting was the succession – often desperate, Néronian – of the most beautiful parties that a man ever gave himself… A work based on the sovereignty of whim, on the refusal to follow, entirely focused on freedom, even to displease… Only a very great aristocrat of the spirit could dare what you dared to do. »
