Picabia, Francis

Picabia, Francis (pĕkä`bēä), 1878–1953, French painter. After working in an impressionist style, Picabia was influenced by cubism and later was one of the original exponents of Dada in Europe and the United States. He contributed to avant-garde periodicals and became associated with the Paris surrealists. Picabia, possessed of an intensely individual temperament, influenced numerous artists of different schools without ever confining himself to one mode of artistic expression. His Physical Culture (1913) is at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

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Picabia, Francis

(born Jan. 22, 1879, Paris, France—died Nov. 30, 1953, Paris) French painter, illustrator, designer, writer, and editor. After studying at the École des Beaux-Arts and the École des Arts Décoratifs, he painted for a time in an Impressionist and then a Cubist style. Picabia went on to combine the Cubist style with Orphic elements in such paintings as I See Again in Memory My Dear Udnie (1913–14), to which he gave proto-Dadaist names. About 1916 he began to paint the satiric, machinelike contrivances that are his chief contribution to Dadaism. In 1915 in New York City, Picabia, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray together founded an American Dadaist movement. In 1917 Picabia returned to Europe and joined Dadaist movements in Barcelona, Paris, and Zürich. After Dadaism broke up about 1921, he followed the poet André Breton into the Surrealist movement. He subsequently painted in Surrealist, abstract, and figurative styles.