Dadaism/Surrealism – Francis Picabia: Radical Visionary of the Parisian Avant-Garde
“Although Picasso was two years Picabia’s junior, however, he remained the more old-fashioned of the two artists in many respects. [...]” (Cat. Kunsthaus Zürich / Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2016, p. 14) These are the words Anne Umland, curator at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, used to sum up Picabia’s almost disconcerting progressiveness on the occasion of the major Picabia retrospective in 2016/17—a quality that even overshadowed the extraordinary innovativeness and influence of Pablo Picasso. Indeed, there is hardly a more fitting way to describe Picabia’s unconventional oeuvre, which ranges from Cubism over Dadaism and Surrealism to the photo-based paintings of the 1940s, than perhaps Picabia’s own aphorism from his Dada period: “Our head is round so that our thinking can change direction.” And Picabia’s thinking radically changed direction several times, repeatedly producing highly advanced results. It is precisely this enormous capacity for change that distinguishes Picabia’s oeuvre in a particular way—a body of work that knows hardly any stylistic or technical boundaries and is equally provocative and astonishing. His beginnings lie in Cubism: In the years before World War I, he produced paintings that attest to Picabia’s closeness to Picasso at the time; however, Picasso’s lifelong commitment to representational painting would soon far outpace Picabia’s experimental spirit. In 1913, Picabia participated, alongside, among others, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, and Marcel Duchamp, in the legendary Armory Show in New York, with a total of four paintings from his Orphic Cubist phase.
Picabia was born in 1879, the son of a Cuban aristocrat and a French woman from the wealthy bourgeoisie; he soon became known not only as an artist but also as a Dadaist writer and for his love of fast cars and attractive women. Following the end of World War I, Picabia entered his avant-garde Dada period, promoting, alongside Duchamp, a completely new concept of art liberated from the shackles of tradition through collages, material compositions, and typographic works. Picabia’s partly large-format, associative typographic works from this period, which also incorporate collaged and painted elements, appear to the contemporary viewer almost like early precursors to the completely uninhibited, free-spirited creations of the American street artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.


Picabia’s “Transparences” (1928–1931) – Icons of Surrealism
In the late 1920s, Picabia finally set to work on his famous series “Transparences” (1928–1931), in which fantastical, surreal scenes, layered across different planes of the image, overlap to create a complex visual impression. Today, these works are considered some of the most iconic creations of Surrealism. Once again, Picabia challenges our conventional visual habits and, inspired by the free and associative wordplay of Dadaist poetry and contemporary innovations in film and photography, creates something radically new. By having various scenes overlap in the depth of the pictorial space, much like transparent film negatives, Picabia superimposed multiple motifs, memories, or fragments in an associative manner, making them accessible within an emotionally highly condensed scene. In 1930, shortly after the creation of this painting, Picabia described the unique quality of his “Transparences” as follows: “These transparencies, with their hidden angles, allow me to express myself entirely according to my inner impulses […] I want a painting in which all my instincts can run free.” (Translated from French according to: Francis Picabia, Foreword to the exhibition at the Galerie Léonce Rosenberg, December 1930).
In the late 1920s, Picabia made the historically significant transition from Dadaism to Surrealism, a movement that began in Paris in 1924 and was initiated by André Breton’s “Manifesto of Surrealism.” Influenced by Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis, Francis Picabia, Max Ernst, and Salvador Dalí—all of whom are now considered leading figures of this significant art movement—began their painterly explorations of the human subconscious, thereby emerging as the revolutionary and driving forces of the Parisian avant-garde in the late 1920s.

“Manucode” in the Context of Botticelli, Bosch, and Rousseau: A Surrealist Symbol of Life Between Innocence and Desire
What depths and chasms of his own subconscious did Francis Picabia explore in this composition with the enigmatic title “Manucode” in 1929? Dramatic, twining plant elements, a flying heart deformed into a surreal creature, two birds, and the black outline of a female face with large eyes gazing aimlessly into the distance—all masterfully woven into a surreal, enigmatic whole against a blue expanse that stretches into an infinite depth. In this painting, which he gave to his daughter Gabrielle-Cécile, nicknamed “Jeanine” on her 16th birthday, Picabia succeeded in capturing his deeply personal emotions and thoughts, his own view of life and love, fused with his fears, desires, and hopes as his daughter embarked on her independent life, on the canvas in a highly complex manner. “Manucode” is a highly personal painting that, like the other works in the small but significant “Transperances” series, is inspired by references to famous paintings from art history, particularly those of the Italian Renaissance. No less a model than Botticelli’s world-famous painting “The Birth of Venus” (1485, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence) serves as the compositional starting point for Picabia’s “Manucode,” whose mysterious title refers to the exotic birds of paradise (Manucodia) with their iridescent black plumage. It is the head gently tilted to the left, the gaze sensually wandering into the distance, and the full lips of Botticelli’s Venus, the goddess of love and beauty, who—in accordance with ancient mythology—is depicted in Botticelli’s painting as being born from a seashell amidst the sea foam and carried ashore in all her intoxicating beauty. Behind it, we see a yellow heart that transforms into a fantastical creature as it extends downward; its posture and curved tail evoke associations with a chameleon-like lizard, suggesting the mutability of our emotions and the fickleness of our hearts. Or is it a butterfly, with its large yellow wings bearing circular shapes reminiscent of fragments of a clock face, symbolizing the transience of all beauty and the unstoppable passage of time? In another superimposition, we see two birds that refer to the title of the work: two birds of paradise, as they appear in numerous depictions of the Garden of Eden—such as in the famous “Garden of Earthly Delights” (1490/1500) by Hieronymus Bosch and in “Paradise and the Fall” (c. 1615, Mauritshuis, The Hague) a collaborative work by Jan Breughel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens, which address the coexistince of humans and animals in paradisiacal innocence and harmony. Picabia’s rich sources of inspiration range from Bosch—who, with his fantastical paintings that brought the subconscious to light for the first time, was regarded by the Surrealists as a kind of founding father of Surrealism—to Henri Rousseau and his famous final painting “The Dream” (1910, Museum of Modern Art, New York), whose fantastical painting was equally admired by the Surrealists and who is today considered one of their most important precursors. But just as in paradise, all beauty, love, and harmony are always fraught with the danger of a sudden end—that primal fear of finitude, desire, and ruin, which is masterfully expressed by the startled, fluttering bird of paradise on the left, the creature emerging from the heart, and the plant parts winding through the pictorial space like a snake.

Picabia was not only a particularly innovative artist, but also a bon vivant with a lifelong passion for women and love, whose own emotional entanglements were at their absolute peak precisely at the time this painting was created in the late 1920s: Picabia was in his fifties and officially still married to his wife Gabrielle; besides their daughter Jeanine, to whom he gave this painting, they had three other children. Since 1925, however, the artist had already been living with his new lover Germaine Everling—whom he had met in 1917 within the Parisian Dadaist circle—and their young son at the Château de Mai in Mougins. But even this new love had already come to an end by the time this painting was created, as Picabia had once again succumbed to his desires and begun an affair with the young Swiss nanny Olga Mohler, which, shortly after his official divorce from Gabrielle in 1933, would ultimately lead to his final separation from Germaine. Picabia then moved in with Olga, who would remain by his side until his death, living on his new yacht “Horizon II,” which was anchored in the port of Cannes. With “Manucode,” Francis Picabia thus grants us a particularly deep and captivating glimpse into his turbulent subconscious as well as into a psyche ruled by hopes and fears and caught between innocence, beauty, love, desire, and sin. [JS]