Nomadic mutiny

In the early twentieth century, many artists crossed the Atlantic in search of new homes. American artists felt their minds were shackled in a puritan backwater, believing the Old World remained the bastion of cultural innovation and refinement. European artists found their trumpeted traditions to be suffocating, that their appetites for truly modern art could only be nourished in the New World. And so the so-called Lost Generation colonized the Parisian neighborhoods of Montmartre and Montparnasse, while a countertide of avant-garde fixtures fled the City of Light for New York. It was in the refuge of Manhattan that a handful of continental émigrés, godfathers of surrealism like Marcel Duchamp and Tristan Tzara, set up a stateside branch of Dada.

Francis Picabia was among these expatriates. He began important work in New York, but nurtured his Dadaist experiments abroad. Where his fellow travelers behaved more like doctrinaires, straying little from their manifestos, Picabia was a freethinker. The intellectual anarchy that sets apart Picabia’s sensibility could not accommodate Dada’s limits. Limits smacked of authority, of artificiality. But the soul of his esthetic was movement, restless imaginative travel; independence came as a windfall. “If you want to have clean ideas,” he once said, “change them as often as your shirt.” And change them he did: he dragged on an art-school flirtation with Impressionism, later liaisons with Fauvism and Cubism and even Orphism, and a famously, slightly longer affair with Dada. Of course, he moved on from there.

This portrait of Picabia, as a stylistic Bedouin, emerges from the new exhibition at the Arts Club of Chicago, “Francis Picabia: A Selection of Works on Paper, 1903-1951.” At 87 works, the scale of the exhibition itself reflects the breadth of Picabia’s peripatetic style. It is clear that where today’s postmodernists labor in vain to evade categories, Picabia effortlessly succeeded. Still, some critics often try to lump him in with the other Dadaists, viewing him narrowly as an enemy of the bourgeois, bent on upsetting the delicate complacencies of the Parisian middle class. But Picabia’s rebellion was promiscuous. In and outside of art, he had many partners and left nearly all of them in his wake—even Dada. He wrote its obituary in 1921. Three years later, not before adopting the style himself, he denounced surrealism.

Fortunately, the Arts Club exhibition conveys Picabia’s nomadic mutiny. From its high vantage point, one can almost trace the tortuous arc of his rejections, zigzagging through modernism’s history. An early self-portrait begins the exhibit. Its spartan pencil lines are unremarkable in nearly every way. But darkness collects in his hair, his tie, and—most forcefully—in his eyes. The drawing’s power centers on his eyes, which belie his young, humbly rendered face, expressing through a squinted glare and tense brow an incipient seriousness, a skepticism, even a hostility, that would steer his art.

A decade later, he had left Impressionism for the fragmented planes of Cubism. By this time, as he began to use watercolor, warm golds and browns trickled into his work, in blends of figuration and abstraction. Not long afterward came Picabia’s Dada phase. To its credit, the exhibition offers little evidence of his famous “mechanomorphs”—more or less, sexualized images of machines. The same goes for his scrawled phrases. Despite his worth to the movement, this phase could be considered his creative nadir. Its adolescent impulses to shock the middle class, disguised as a salvo at the zeitgeist, are as vulgar as they are inert.

Perhaps his most interesting, and most influential, works on paper are his “transparencies.” In these works he suspends his own creations above ghosts of Romanesque frescoes, anticipating the appropriations of postmodern art. Coupled with the shifting scale of his figures, flora, and fauna, the technique of overlaying creates a protean, dreamlike illusion of depth.

The exhibit closes chronologically with Picabia’s Dada. So many years after abandoning the movement, the title alone draws a sort of momentum. It views a nude couple from behind. The woman’s arm is melodramatically outstretched, and the man wraps one arm around her shoulders, bringing the other to his face. Does she humiliate him? Is he crying? Laughing? Picabia’s shaky relationship to Dada is compressed into these gestures. Under a glaze of kitsch, the ambiguity of the two figures mirrors the final ambivalence he felt toward the movement. Whether the extravagant illogic of Dada finally amused him or embarrassed him, it is unclear. Like a withered lothario, meditating on his youthful romances, Picabia seems uncertain about his choices. Given the same opportunity to look backward, across his entire half-decade career, gallerygoers are invited to meditate on the same choices.