Francis Picabia through Four Decades and Three Series

One of the only artistic convictions that Francis Picabia staunchly stood by was a drive toward constant experimentation. Unlike many of his contemporaries working in the turn-of-the-century modernist movements, Picabia explored multiple styles of painting, deftly moving from cubism through the mechanomorphic, text-based work of his Dada years and back toward figuration. A recent show at Galerie Andrea Caratsch in Zurich, “Francis Picabia: Paintings 1909-1950,” highlighted the extensive oeuvre of the restless artist, who once said: “If you want to have clean ideas, change them as often as your shirt.”

The exhibition featured some rare early works—a Fauvist landscape and portraits of Spanish women wearing mantillas—but weighs heavily toward three recurring styles that he explored after his break with Dada: the “Transparence” paintings he worked on in the late 1920s and early ’30s, a series of erotic nudes from the 1940s, and the proliferation of abstraction that defined the last decade of his career.


The neutral-toned “Transparence” series draws on classical sources, from antique Roman sculpture to paintings by Titian and Peter Paul Rubens, to create enigmatic layered images. Despite the aesthetic correlations between these works and Surrealism (which Picabia rejected any connection to), he retains a tongue-in-cheek tone in the way he appropriates these images—overlapping them with equal weight so that ultimately each image presents a discordant view of the human form.

Picabia seemed intent on subverting ideals of elegance and beauty. Turning his eye to the glossy images of commercial and erotic magazines, Picabia worked on a series of realist nudes in the ’40s. The high-contrast compositions hint at classical nudes—like those by Gustave Courbet, for example—but maintain Picabia’s ironic voice through his emphasis of the subject’s exaggerated, suggestive expressions and a heavy handling of their lustrous hair and makeup.