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| Francis Picabia (FRENCH 1879 - 1953)
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| Effets de brouillard sur les bords de la Loire, Candes 1908
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Signed & dated 1908
Oil on canvas
21.5 x 25.5 in / 54.5 x 64.5 cm
Certificate of authenticity by the Comité Picabia and will be included in the forthcoming supplement to the catalogue raisonné
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Francis Picabia was born in Paris on the 22nd of January 1878, the son of a Spanish father and a French mother. Schooled at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs in Paris between 1895-7, he became a prolific and highly successful painter of impressionist scenes in the succeeding decade. The possession of a healthy private income enabled him to live life to the full, including a passion for fast cars, and he quickly found his way into the avant-garde circles of the day. Picabia was a genuine pioneer in art history, both through his painting and through his tireless dissemination of art theory and art historical ideas.
He has a valid claim to have painted the first abstract painting in 1908 (preceeding the work of Kandinsky) which is now exhibited in the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris. He appeared to move effortlessly through the artist movements of his day, assimilating neo-impressionism, fauvism and cubism before becoming the centre of the Dada movement in Paris and later still the Surrealists. He met Duchamp in 1911 who was to become a huge influence on his work and in 1913 he visited New York as a spokesman for the cubist pictures exhibited in the famous Amoury show of that year.
He was known by this time also as a designer, writer and editor and he contributed to Stieglitz’s “Review 291” before setting up his own magazine based on it, "391" in Barcelona (where he lived during this period). After a period in Zurich he returned to Paris in 1919 to launch the Dada movement only to denounce it for no longer being new in 1921, when after meeting with André Breton he helped mould the nascent Surrealist movement. It wasn’t long before he began to attack this movement in the pages of his own journal, "391," and in 1925 he moved to Cote d’Azur to persue his painting in various differing styles.
Although at the very centre of the Parisian avant-garde, Picabia wholeheartedly rejected Duchamp’s nihilist proclamations of “anti-art.” During this period he continued to write on art theory as well as poetry. He also conceived a ballet "Relache" and worked in film. By 1945 he returned to Paris before dying there on the 30th of November 1953.
He is represented in almost every major museum of modern art including the Tate in London and New York’s Museum of Modern Art. He was made a knight of the Légion d’Honneur in 1933 and an officer in 1950. There is unsurprisingly a vast amount of information on the artist, both in the form of books on the artist’s life and on the art movements he helped to form and promote.
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