Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round so Our Thoughts Can Change Direction - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1633450031 ISBN 13: 9781633450035

Publisher: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2016

Synopsis

By rejecting consistency, Picabia powerfully asserted the artist's freedom to change

Irreverent and audacious, restless and brilliant, Francis Picabia achieved fame as a leader of the Dada group only to break publicly with the movement in 1921. Moving between Paris, the French Riviera, Switzerland, and New York, he led a dashing life, painting, writing, yachting, gambling, racing fast cars, and organizing lavish parties. Like no other artist before him, Picabia created a body of work that defies consistency and categorization, from Impressionist landscapes to abstraction, from Dada to stylized nudes, and from performance and film to poetry and publishing. A primary constant in his career was his vigorous unpredictability.

Illustrated with nearly 500 reproductions, this sweeping survey of Picabia's eclectic career embraces the challenge of his work, asking how we can make sense of its wildly shifting mediums and styles. In her opening essay, curator Anne Umland writes that with Picabia, familiar oppositions "between high art and kitsch, progression and regression, modernism and its opposite, and success and failure are undone."

In 15 superb essays, additional authors―including distinguished professors George Baker, Briony Fer, and David Joselit and renowned Picabia scholars Carole Boulbès and Arnauld Pierre―delve into the radically various mediums, styles, and contexts of Picabia's work, discussing his Dada period, his abstractions, his mechanical paintings, his appropriations of source imagery, his multifaceted relationship with print (both in his paintings and as a publisher and contributor to vanguard journals), his forays into screenwriting and theater, and his complex politics. Marcel Duchamp, of course, but also Nietzsche and Gertrude Stein make repeat appearances along the way.

Turning to Picabia's contemporary legacy, Cathérine Hug maps the history of his critical reception and interviews contemporary curators and artists, including Peter Fischli, Albert Oehlen, and David Salle. A lively 30-page chronology illustrated with archival photographs and ephemera gives readers a year-by-year account of the artist's colorful life and of his interactions with fellow artists and critics, friends, and lovers.

Together these essays suggest that the unruly genius of Picabia offers us a powerfully relevant and provocative alternative to the familiar narrative of modernism.

Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round So Our Thoughts Can Change Direction accompanies the major 2016 exhibition on the artist, jointly organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Kunsthaus Zürich.

Francis Picabia was born in 1879 in Paris, the only child of a Cuban-born Spanish father and a French mother. His first success came as a painter in an Impressionist manner. He went on to become one of the principle figures of the Dada movement in New York and Paris. In 1925 Picabia moved to the south of France, where he lived and worked through World War II. Following the war, Picabia returned to Paris, where he died in 1953.

About this title

About the Author:

Anne Umland is the Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Cathérine Hug is Curator, 20th Century Art at the Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland.

Review:

absurdly delightful paintings. (Robert Pincus-Witten Artforum)

..not many historical figures have seemed as ripe [as Picabia] not only for reevaluation, but simply to have her or his work seen fully. (Sanford Schwartz The New York Review of Books)

The French avant-garde artist's work was prescient about our era of 'post-truth' politics and culture.... He specializes in disinformation and is the early Modernist embodiment of 'post-truth'. (Kenneth Goldsmith The Art Newspaper)

The 10 Best Art Books of 2016 (Rachel Corbett New York Magazine)

From his earliest Impressionist efforts, through Cubist, Dadaist, Surrealist and realist work... Picabia shifted fluidly with the cultural moment, all the while vigorously denouncing the style he’d just left behind...With copious illustrations and 16 essays, this hefty catalog for the current retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art attempts to chart a zigzag career that made up in energy what it lacked in depth of exploration. (Albert Mobilio The New York Times)

Picabia found the right container for his instincts. Those paintings make me deliriously happy; they sing. It’s amazing they exist. (David Salle The Art Newspaper)

The pluralist of pluralists produced some masterpieces and more unbelievably ugly paintings than any other artist in the twentieth century - besting even Sigmar Polke and Martin Kippenberger - and I cannot stop myself from loving them all. (Daniel Birnbaum Artforum, Best of 2016)

Picabia’s fundamental comportment or attitude of refusal―of ironic negation―was the constant running through the early and late work, just as it was the constant running through his life...underneath this apparent indifference is the unmistakable echo of a reflexive negation, the constant assertion of a “no” resounding in a self-chosen void. (Daniel Barbiero Arteidolia)

crackles with immediacy, popping free of its time to wink at the present (Peter Schjeldahl The New Yorker)

A leading light of the Dada movement... visually anticipating the Pop, Conceptual and Postmodern art movements (Paul Laster CULTURED)

About this edition

• Publisher: The Museum of Modern Art, New York
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1633450031
• ISBN 13: 9781633450035
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368
• Editor: Umland Anne, Hug Cathérine