Francis-Marie Martinez de Picabia (January 22nd 1879 with Paris - November 30th 1953 in the same city), was a painter, Graphiste and writer Dada ïste and surrealist.

Its life

He studied at the schools of the Art schools and the Decorative Arts. At the beginning of its career, of 1903 with 1908, it was influenced by the painters of Barbizon, côtoya Alfred Sisley and Camille Pissaro which it met in 1898, then paintings impressionist S, cubists and finally abstract. Its watercolour Caoutchouc (1909, M.N.A.M., Paris) was regarded as one of works founders of the Abstract art.

In 1911, it joined the Groupe of Puteaux which met in the studio of the painter Jacques Villon. It was also in relation to the artist Marcel Duchamp. It became also orphist and created in 1912, in Puteaux, the Living room of the Section of gold, before being the first international success with the exposure of the Armory Show of New York in 1913, where it founded with Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray the review 291 . Marked by the Crushing chocolate and the concept of Objet trouv3e of Marcel Duchamp, it made since 1913 a series of works where it took again the esthetics of the draftsmanship, recopying or simplifying images which it found in the scientific magazine Science and the Life . The compositions of Picabia present a voluntarily absurd character, as well by the title which was given to them as by the inscriptions and texts with which they were provided.

From 1913 to 1915, Picabia went several times to New York and took an active share in the movements of avant-garde, introducing the Modern art on the American continent. In 1916, after a series of compositions “mechanists” where it treated the objects manufactured with a distant irony, it launched to Barcelona the review 391 and adopted the Dadaïsme. It met Tristan Tzara and hobby-horse of Zurich in 1918 groups it. It was then made the propagator of hobby-horse with André Breton with Paris - moment when it created works of a particularly provocative and truculent humor. Polemist, iconoclast, sacrilege, turbulent Picabia was agitated a time around Dada in electron free, while being in theory anti-all, even anti-Picabia. In 1921, it broke with its former accomplices.

Francis Picabia was a modern truth. In addition to the car, it was impassioned for the cinema and the photography to which it was initiated very early. Its writings on the cinema reveal a real interest and it had a presentiment of the part which the American cinema would continue to play. In 1924, it wrote a delirious scenario (showing part of failures between Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray) for short-measuring Entracte , intended to be projected with the interval of its ballet instantaneist Relâche (choreography of Jean Börlin, music of Erik Satie). He then worked for the Swedish Ballets of Rolf de Maré, for which he carried out many decorations.

Picabia was the man of all the innovative currents and refused to be let lock up in only one type of expression. It had periods related to the Futurisme, with the academic figuration (with the oneiric accents). After 1945, it joined again with the abstraction.

Liking much the festivals and the cars (it collected some more than 150) he ruined himself, which pushed it to multiply the small fabrics of many kinds, sometimes even inspired by pornographic magazines. Were its last tables minimalists, of the points of colors sown on thick and monochromic funds, titrated I do not want more to paint, which price? , Painting without goal or Silence… . Criticism would re-examine the sign of Hobby-horse there. A great retrospective of this kaleidoscopic artist was held with the gallery Rene Drouin in Paris in spring 1949.

He wrote also Poésie.

Its works