Francis Picabia

     Francis Picabia is a Christopher Columbus of art.  No one can match
his philosophical "stoicism," his creative faculty, his artisan's composure.
He navigates without a compass.  He was the one to discover the "Concrete
Isles" where the abstract gentlemen devour one another.  At the limits of
the world, at the most advanced point of our frantic and preposterous
civilization, at the edge of the great desert of emptiness in which even
the nerve-wracking weather vane of vanity disappears, he heard the humming
of the brass distaff, spinning with ever-increasing fury the blazing thread
of a black and unreal fire, the thread of human existence.  In these places
of modern "melancholy" he makes the acquaintance of a nude recoiling aghast
before its own mirror image.  The nude, shaken with disgust at the human
figure that reminds him of a jellyfish, staggers over into an armchair and
waves his legs and arms around like tentacles.  He stubbornly perseveres in
these movements.  The senselessness of existence strangles him.  He convul-
sively waves his tentacles.  Does he want to cling to emptiness, does he
want to brush his disgust on a canvas?  The nude opts for disgust at painting,
and Picabia rejoices because he despises tragedy.
     I first met Francis Picabia when he was visiting Zurich in 1917.  He came
as an emissary of the American dadaists to greet his colleagues in Zurich.
Tristan Tzara and I, curious and impressed, went over to his hotel.  We found
him busy dissecting an alarm clock.  I was reminded of Rembrandt's Anatomy
Lesson in the Museum of Amsterdam.  After all, we had advanced quite a bit
toward the abstract.  Ruthlessly, he slashed away at his alarm clock down to
the spring, which he pulled out triumphantly.  Interrupting his labor for a
moment, he greeted us and soon impressed the wheels, the spring, the hands,
and other secret parts of the clock on pieces of paper.  He tied these im-
pressions together with lines and accompanied the drawing with comments of
a rare wit far removed from the world of mechanical stupidity.  He was creating
antimechanical machines.  In those days he was endlessly enamored of wheels,
screws, motors, cylinders, electric wiring.  Using these forms he drew and
painted machines of the unconscious.  He created a teeming flora of these
gratuitous machines.  The Daughter Born without a Mother, a booklet of
devastating poetry, was written around that time.  This collection has no 
trace whatsoever of the dried sponges of rhetoric, no ensnaring claptrap,
no padding in a brassière.
     But Picabia never played on a single string.  I know melodies of his
that sing of the tangible whiteness and the movements of a swan.  Clouds
with voices of myth take shape, grow, pass by.  Sometimes the sirocco becomes
a sirococo, and Picabia consents.  How can one enumerate the paintings made
of drinking straws, confetti, paintings for harems, paintings for dwarfs.
He painted empty-eyed bouquets, bouquets of hearts in neutral gear, forget-
me-not-covered couples, husks of kisses.  The challenges and flashes of wit
in his paintings are numberless.  Whether Picabia observes metamorphoses or
writes a canvas in answer to a letter, his documents are always centuple
palimpsests.  Picabia is a desperate case.  In his earliest youth he was
stricken with painting-madness.  He paints day and night, with a vengeance
and with a vendetta.  At night he paints over the canvas he has painted
during the day, and in the daytime he paints over the canvas he has painted
at night.  His paintings get fatter all the time.  His need to paint without
interruption is explained by a fanatical and maniacal interest that balances
his dadaist irony.  His obsession knows neither joking nor the fin-de-siècle
wit in which blasphemy in the rule.  He is lost body and soul in the act of
creation.  It is not the highly finished and well-framed painting that he is
looking for.  Contrary to all likelihood, he approaches original sin, the
absolute, and all the "Jesus Rastaquouères" cannot save him.

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