Picabia Painting in All Its States
Is Bernard Marcadé a historian or a biographer? In any case, the man who has taken a passionate interest in the libertarian spirit of Dada and situationism
is not afraid of long-term work. Almost fifteen years after publishing a monumental biography of Marcel Duchamp (Flammarion, 2007), he is now delivering, with the same publisher, a no less substantial life of Francis Picabia, Rastaquouère (704 p., 35 euros). The author of an essay Éloge du Mauvais Esprit (La Différence, 1986) as well as of Isidore Ducasse (Seghers, 2002) certainly
has a sense of continuity.
When did the idea of writing this biography of Francis Picabia arise? Wasn’t it while you were working on Marcel Duchamp’s biography, given the proximity of the two artists? No, it was born later. I discovered while writing about Duchamp that I enjoyed biography as a genre, and I initially wanted to write about Andy Warhol. I wanted to move forward a bit in the century. But there were already many biographies of Warhol... Moreover, I realised that while there were good monographs on Picabia, notably those by Maria Lluïsa Borràs and William Camfield, there was no serious biography. Furthermore, I felt, artistically, in terms of imagination, closer to Picabia than to Duchamp, whom I perceived as the opposite of me. Paradoxically, Duchamp had helped me to get out of myself, whereas Picabia plunged me back into my own wanderings and contradictions. So it was a risk. But don’t we need that too?
Indeed, however close Duchamp and Picabia were in life, their personalities were
sharply contrasted. Duchamp was amused by the duo he formed with Picabia. He even spoke of “artistic pederasty”, comparing it to that of Braque and Picasso. They were really polar opposites. One was taciturn, Marcel Duchamp, and kept to himself; the other, Francis Picabia, was an extrovert, had money, and collected cars (he had 127 in his lifetime); Duchamp had only one, a Volkswagen given to him by his last wife, Teeny, and which he had nicknamed “False Vagina” One was provincial, from Normandy, the other very Parisian and international, of Spanish and Cuban origin on his father’s side, while his mother belonged to the Parisian intellectual bourgeoisie. Picabia lived the high life, went out a lot on the Right Bank, and was a fan of opium and laudanum. This did not fail to impress Duchamp, who had just arrived from Normandy and was living with his brothers in a somewhat stuffy way in Puteaux. From the outset, Picabia regarded Duchamp’s brothers and the Puteaux circle in general as particularly boring and nit-picking. Duchamp could not but admire this man who had forced him to step outside himself and his family circle. Didn’t Gabrielle Buffet herself, Francis Picabia’s first wife, say that she had unburdened Duchamp of his innocence?
There’s another contrast: one stopped painting, while the other continued to paint prolifically. One painted his last picture in 1918, the title of which, Tu M’ is revealing. We know why painting bothered him: Du
champ was not a very good painter, and he knew it. His genius was to decide to do something else with his life and oeuvre. Whereas Picabia remained attached all his life to painting in all its forms. That was his only loyalty! During the first part of his life he did neo-impressionism from postcards, and earned a lot of money. Then he quickly went through a transitional period, a little Nabis, a little Fauvist, a little Symbolist, and then “mechanomorphism” which is his very singular contribution to Dada.
SHAKING UP BANALITY
Would you say that one remained more faithful to Dada than the other? I think both remained faithful to Dada, but in different ways. They remained Dada in their common opposition to André Breton. Neither Duchamp nor Picabia wanted to join Surrealism or claimed to be part of anything. Duchamp organised Surrealist exhibitions in the United States in direct opposition to the principles laid down by Breton in Paris (this is how he imposed Dalí against the Surrealist doxa of the time). Picabia, on the other hand, remained Dada by taking a stand against Dada. He understood very early on that Dada could become a genre and become ossified. So he spat on it, but in doing so he was Dada. Even his supposedly reactionary paintings of the 1940s, and the ‘dots’ at the end of his life, are a way of shaking up the formal banality of the time.
One of the many contradictions of this character is that he had a precocious vocation to be a painter, but then spent his life, so to speak, dodging painting. You mention the periods of depression he went through. Was he struggling with himself? I couldn’t ignore the depressive dimension that is at the heart of his life, but I refrained from dwelling on/emphasising it. I didn’t use the term “manic-depressive” or “bipolar” which were not expressions of the time. We used to say “neurasthenic”. In a note he sent to Tzara, Picabia used the expression “la neu-neu”.Yes, I still had to talk about his illness, his relationship with medication and drugs. In fact, I would like to write a little book on “Picabia’s pharmacy”, a nod to Jacques Derrida’s La Pharmacie de Platon [Plato’s Pharmacy]. More than the illness, pharmaceutics, its products (painting is also a product) allow us to understand Picabia. There is the idea of poisoning painting and being poisoned by it in turn. He also says that he is both the one who poisons painting and the one who cures it and takes pleasure in it.
NECESSARY PLAGIARISM
In this spirit, did reading Nietzsche play a role? Like Duchamp, he wasn’t a big reader. Perhaps Duchamp had read a little more, for example the Greek Sceptics, and Henri Poincaré, but in popularised works. Duchamp was suspicious of language. Picabia, on the other hand, wrote and was a wonderful poet. He read little (the authors most often referred to by him were Max Stirner and Nietzsche). He never stopped using Nietzsche in the titles of his paintings and even in his personal life. Carole Boulbès has shown how, at the end of his life, his love letters to Suzanne Romain are made up of misappropriated and doctored Nietzsche quotes. In his Poésies, Isidore Ducasse, alias Lautréamont, considers plagiarism necessary. The person who best follows Lautréamont’s logic is Picabia. He took plagiarism to an almost metaphysical level.
Very much a precursor of contemporary art... What is decidedly astonishing is to have had
the desire to become a painter, and to have from the outset, before Dada, refused to look at reality: copying, not even the paintings of the masters in the Louvre, but vulgar postcards. In the beginning he masked it, he cheated. In his Post-Impressionist period, he claimed to be painting from nature, whereas he based his work on photographs. As far as this disconnection from reality is concerned, we must take into account the role of Gabrielle Buffet. She was a musician, and it was she who led him to consider that art didn’t necessarily have a relationship with reality, that it was an autonomous domain like music. She gave him this taste, as she gave it to Duchamp, who was very much in love with her.
Picabia was “a ladies’ man”, as they used to say, but I would add “characterful ladies”. He kept up a lifelong correspondence with Gabrielle as well as with Germaine Everling. They, and Olga Mohler, accepted situations that were not obvious ones, such as a ménage à trois, or even a ménage à quatre... That’ s not easy for women, and it’s not easy for men either. I think that, surprisingly in view of what I said about him earlier, Duchamp was much more “into sex” than Picabia. Of course, Duchamp was not a seducer, but he was a man who let himself be seduced. It must be said that at the time he did not have much work to do, because he was a real “object of desire” Picabia’s attitude, on the other hand, was more ‘‘active’’. Picabia was someone who really fell in love and didn’t know how to get out of complicated situations, whereas Duchamp had an unbeatable technique in this respect. Duchamp didn’t spatially superimpose his love relationships as Picabia did. He superimposed them temporally. His rule was to limit the frequency of his relations. He often said to his companions: no more than two nights a week...
He was really into economics! Yes! The Duchampian economy of love is incredible! While Picabia gave his all, he couldn’t choose, he lived in sentimental chaos, and he suffered. He was no manager, in this field or in the management of his money. He had a fortune, which he squandered several times.
STRUCTURAL DUPLICITY
You relate this superimposition of romantic relationships to the set of paintings called Transparences. And you use the expression “structural duplicity” Picabia was twofold. So was Duchamp. Duchamp spoke of the “co-intelligence of opposites” as constitutive of his artistic process as well as of his life principle. But to speak of twofold isn’t enough a propos Picabia. He had a multiplicity of identities within himself. He gave himself different names to sign his articles in his review 391: Pharamousse, FunnyGuy, Loustic...
The psychoanalyst Anton Ehrenzweig has analysed this ability of artists to move back and forth between opposites, because not knowing the opposition between black and white, good and evil, is precisely what allows them to create. I find that for personalities like those of Picabia, Duchamp, and Dalí, this is obvious. They reveal this structure to us. From this perspective, can we say that Picabia traverses all styles? Well, yes, except futurism, strangely enough. Impressionism, Fauvism, Orphism, Dada of course, Surrealism without being part of it; later on abstraction, materialism (with its dots taken from matter) and even a certain primitivism.
Despite his individualism, he seems not to mind being presented as a master of abstract art. Michel Seuphor exposes him; Michel Tapié defends him. Unwittingly, he produced the first abstract watercolour in 1909, Caoutchouc [Rubber]. Nina, Kandinsky’s widow, constantly questioned Gabrielle to find out if this was true, because Kandinsky himself only “invented” abstraction in 1910. Picabia didn’t create the first abstract work knowingly, he painted this watercolour, among other things! That’s the beauty of it.
Still, wasn’t being looked upon at the end of his life as the precursor of abstraction being “re-appropriated”? He was happy to have become a reference, but no more than that. Like Duchamp, he let things happen, he let younger people come to him (Soulages claims that Picabia counted for him!), but he wasn’t into avant-garde heroism.
RELATIONSHIP TO LIFE
A word that often comes up in his discourse is “invention”. You have to invent. Not to be locked into a category, not to stick to the configurations of the time. He had the desire, the will and the pleasure of not belonging to a school. But he never theorised about the change of style. That’s an idea of our days. He did it the way he behaved in life, it was linked to his relationship to life.
And this pleasure in moving came before the choice of subject... For Picabia, all subjects were valid. We see this during the famous period of the 1940s. The subjects were borrowed from what we now call “revues de charme”, magazines, considered pornographic at the time. This wasn’t a charming period, since these paintings were done during the war.To claim, as has been done, that they were “Pétainist” paintings, or even part of “Nazi kitsch”, is really to be blind. These are rather badly done paintings that have no
Prostitution universelle. 1918-19. Encre noire, tempera et peinture métallisée sur carton black ink, tempera and metallic paint on cardboard. 74,5 x 94,2 cm. (Coll. The Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven)
thing to do with the neo-classical delirium of the time. Picabia in fact derided Picasso’s Ingresque Neo-classicism.
There’s only one painting, Spring, in which a man’s broad torso is shown in the foreground, in front of a woman whose body is caught in a flying piece of cloth. It was executed from a photograph, and the photographs of this period were in this aesthetic, particularly under the influence of naturism, using in particular the effects of low angle, typical of the modernist photography of the 1930s. But the way it is painted is to be seen and understood as the deliberate lambasting and undermining of the principles at work in the propaganda aesthetic of the time.
Of all the styles he went through, could there be one in which he was more himself? For a long time in art history, the Dada period has been privileged. I don’t see how Picabia is more himself in this period than in the nude period. I’m not defending the idea of a good and a not so good Picabia, I’m more interested in the intensity with which he put everything on the same level. Only the signature remains the same, “Francis Picabia”, in very careful handwriting. Then of course, it’s up to individual taste.
My taste leads me to prefer the Monstres and the Transparences. Among the latter there are some very beautiful paintings in the conventional sense, although he prac
Femmes au bull-dog. 1941-42. Huile sur carton oil on cardboard. 106 x 76 cm. (© Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. Rmn-Grand Palais / Jean-Claude Planchet ; Source : Comité Picabia)
tices, as always, the borrowing of motifs. He was the only one to practice these superimpositions and if this is what represents him the most, it is because he lived this superimposition, that of sentimental situations with several women simultaneously. Formally, this period is very important. Duchamp gave the key to this when he spoke of a depth produced with flat images. Many commentators have also analysed the relationship to cinema that followed Picabia’s collaboration with René Clair and the superimposition of images in Entr’acte (1924).The context is fascinating and this is perhaps the most surrealist period, a successful surrealism, but one that has never been categorised as such. He used motifs from Catalan art, Italian Renaissance painting, and drew on a butterfly manual to come up with the titles. As for the Monsters, directly inspired by postcards, there is an historical debate, as he and Picasso were seeing a lot of each other at the time, and it seems that his Kisses influenced Picasso. As for the use of Ripolin, which began before the Monsters, it really reflects a desire to reject the nobility of material, to push painting into the “ignobility” of industrial production.
What you explain about the period of the Liberation and the troubles Picabia encountered then, which were essentially due to the confusion that reigned during the purge, is very clear. It’s important. It was Gabrielle, who had been a member of the Resistance, who got him out of the trap into which he’d fallen. He wrote a text in 1941 in which he said of Pétain that the Marshal “is a young man, younger than all our deputies and ministers”. There is irony in this; Pétain was senile when he came to power. Nor should we forget the context of the time. Gertrude Stein, who was a friend of Picabia’s, translated Marshal Pétain’s speeches into English. But we mustn’t overdo it, Picabia did not make the trip to Germany! He did not put into practice a more or less Nazi aesthetic. He was indifferent, like Duchamp. But Duchamp was lucky enough to be in the United States. They both had an old anarchist background, they hated militarism, they hated nationalism. So they didn’t do anything...
And you write: “This is perhaps where the limits of the art of compromise lie.” Partly because of this exaggeration about his behaviour during the war and a misinterpretation of his later periods, the rediscovery of Picabia was later than that of Duchamp.
It’s very much due to our generation. It wasn’t until the 1980s that we began to open up his work and to say that we could look at all of his work, and as always, we owe this to artists, such as John Armleder, Mike Kelley, François Morellet, David Salle and Sigmar Polke. Even Daniel Buren, whom I interviewed in 1986, told me he was interested not in Duchamp, but in Picabia. Bertrand Lavier feels more and more on the side of Picabia, although he’s often been relegated to a postDuchamp position.
As far as I’m concerned, it was Bernard Dufour, with whom I visited the 1976 retrospective, who opened my eyes. Would you say that the current period is more Duchampian or more Picabian? I hope it will be Picabian or Picabiesque (I’ve never been able to choose between these two adjectives)... We need an artist who breaks frames and that’s what I think continues to be contemporary.
I’m asking you this question because we’re seeing more painting today than a few years ago. Painting always guided Picabia, painting in all its states, a painting that he mishandled, that he dragged into the most dubious mires and swamps... But what remains incredibly inactive today, and therefore of vital necessity, is freedom, and even the anarchistic spirit.This is what we need.