On Art

...His highly abstracted watercolors, some of them drawn from dockyard activities and the performances of Negro entertainers in nightclubs, were promptly exhibited by the pioneering art dealer and photographer Alfred Stieglitz in his Little Gallery of the Photo-Secession...

...Camfield notes, however, that there has been a revival of interest in some of the almost Pop aspects of his later work among contemporary artists like Jim Dine, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns...

...In 1897, at the age of 18, he launched a lifetime career of amorous adventures by fleeing to Switzerland with the mistress of a Parisian journalist...

...The heroine of Picabia's early poems and his early machinist art was "The Girl Born Without a Mother"--a euphemism for the machine, a creature born of man's mind for his ease and service, a product of an immaculate nonconception...

...In 1951 a stroke ended his painting...

...It was then that he was made a Knight in the French Legion of Honor...

...Actually, Picabia was born in Paris to a French mother and Cuban father, but the family seems to have maintained business and family connections in Spain...

...Cranks, pistons, circuit breakers, induction coils, camshafts--all find their place in Picabia's art of this period, each bearing marvelous but frequently mysterious sexual implications...

...To a certain extent, his reputation has suffered from the diffident conduct of his career...

...Picabia's most significant contribution to modernist art, it consisted of the paintings and drawings, dating roughly from 1915 to the early '20s, using extrapolated illustrations of gadgets and machine parts for creating randy sexual allusions...

...filmmaker Rene Clair...

...She Corrects Manners Laughingly, a portrait of his first wife in the form of an automobile windshield, which the artist signed facetiously, "The Faithful Picabia...

...At the end of the War, he returned to Paris...

...The earlier works--Notre Dame, Effect of Sunlight (1906), a portrait of the actress Mistinguett (1907) that owes something to Toulouse-Lautrec, the Cubistic landscape drawings and paintings of around 1909--make it perfectly clear that Picabia had enormous gifts as an artist and all the right connections for the role he was to play in the modernist drama...

...When critics noted a conservative trend in his art, a seeming disavowal of his earlier radical affiliations with the Cubists and Dadaists, he remarked laconically: "To make love is not modern, but that is still what I like best...

...And during the course of his life, according to the estimate of his third wife, Olga, he owned more than 100 automobiles--Fords, Mercers, an emblematic Rolls-Royce...

...The paintings range from a quasi-Impressionist view of Parisian rooftops painted in 1900 to a symbolist abstraction, Danger of Force, completed three years before Picabia's death in 1953...

...Handsome, aggressive, wealthy and intelligent, Picabia also liked to paint...

...Picabia hit upon what Dr...

...In the politicized '30s, still a devotee of the good life, Picabia divided his time between his house in Paris and cruising the harbor at Golfe Juan in his 70-foot yacht, L'Horizon...

...The fortunes of war and a life of extravagance had successfully reduced his income...

...Camfield's exhibition, the first comprehensive retrospective held here, restores that work to the context of the artist's career...

...There is some evidence that her radical writing experiments--the highly idiosyncratic, abstract word-portraits of friends and acquaintances like Picasso and Matisse--may have had an influence both on Picabia's mechanistic "portraits" and the poetry he published intermittently throughout his lifetime...

...It was, however, Picabia's experiences in New York, where he came for the opening of the 1913 Armory Show, that marked the real beginnings of his career...

...Picabia's poetry, though--with its cosmopolitan flavor, its intriguing non sequitur juxtapositions--perhaps owes a good deal more to another friend and frequenter of Gertrude Stein's salon, the tight-fisted poet and bon vivant, Guillaume Apollinaire...

...While in New York, Picabia became immensely attracted to certain aspects of the urban scene...

...On a return visit to New York in 1915, Picabia formed an esthetic partnership with the also visiting Duchamp, thus initiating the New York branch of Dada & Co...

...The Guggenheim exhibition is comprised of 103 paintings, drawings and mixed-media works as well as a considerable number of interesting and relevant documents--letters, photographs, Dadaist handbills and publications...

...William A. Cam-field, the organizer of the present show and the author of its very informative catalogue, has called his "Machinist Style...

...Following World War II, he was under a cloud as a collaborator, though he may merely have chosen to exhibit during the Occupation of France, or been indifferent in expressing his political views (Camfield is not quite explicit on this score...

...For the next two years, apparently--except for cigarettes and whiskey--there was little left to contemplate but the tiresome aftermath of a long and successful party...

...In this turbulent period he created a ballet, Relache, with Erik Satie, and a film, Entr'acte, with the young...

...He was thoroughly apprised of all the signal developments of the Parisian art world and followed adeptly in the path of modernism from a first Impressionism through the Fauvism of Matisse and the early stages of Cubism as developed by Picasso...

...She appears as the presiding genius of his paintings and drawings, the zaniest of which, in its Rube Goldberg associations, is Amorous Parade, and the most beautiful of which is titled in her name, a diagram of a railway engine painted a sumptuous green and gold...

...The value of Camfield's exhibition is that it reacquaints a large section of the American public with an artist whose work is little known and less understood...

...The 1949 theft of a cache of jewelry on which he had been planning to live out his old age dealt him another serious blow...

...His entries in that exhibition, Dances at the Spring and Procession Seville--large-scale, brilliant Cubist epics--achieved the same notoriety in the American press and with the American public as Marcel Duchamp's famous Nude Descending a Staircase and Matisse's tortured Blue Nude...

...It is clear from the show, I think, that Picabia's machinist art--and the large Cubist works that preceded it--remain the really important achievement of his career...

...With a nice flair for Dadaist irony, the Guggenheim Museum, in its current retrospective of Picabia's works, has mislabeled his 1922 La Nuit Espagnole--a large black and white painting of the silhouette of a nude woman ringed with targets and punctured with bulletholes--as the Spanish Knight...

...The Englished title might equally apply to the artist himself--if one adds the necessary Errant...

...The titles of both works were conceived in the Dadaist spirit of prolife, anti-art, paradoxically emphasizing the cancellation of a theatrical performance and its intermission...

...Yet, strangely, the range of that achievement has received little attention in the history of modern art...

...During World War I Picabia, to escape military service, exiled himself to New York, Barcelona and, for brief periods of time, Zurich, where he consulted a famous neurologist for relief from the problems of his disordered personal life...

...I suspect that this exhibition--and Camfield's thoroughly documented catalogue--will make it impossible to overlook Picabia's contributions in the future...

...The Museum of Modern Art rightfully featured Picabia's machinist period two years ago in its grand wrap-up, "The Machine As Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age...

...In the Guggenheim exhibition there are several of the former...

...One of the generators of the modernist movement, Picabia has been overshadowed by his colleagues, many of them artists of lesser talent...

...two of the most notable are Here, This Is Stieglitz, a malfunctioning camera, and Gabrielle Buffet...

...Picabia contributed to the polemics as well, by means of his own erratically published journal, 391 (named in emulation of Stieglitz' gallery and publication, 291...

...With some prescience, Gertrude Stein, who became friendly with Picabia in 1913, found his New York work "much more interesting" than the things he had done in Paris...

...In the 1920s he withdrew from the esthetic squabbles of Paris--where the Dadaists were noisily making themselves over into Surrealists--to take up the pleasures of suburban life at Tremblay-sur-Mauldre...

...Later in the decade, he retired to an estate he built near Cannes...

...There he became a leader of the full-fledged Dada movement, participating in the palace revolutions brought on by the the continuing struggle between its pope and antipope, Andre Breton and Tristan Tzara...

...Her friendship with Picabia, and support for his art, intensified in the '30s when he painted a monumental but rather static portrait of her and his style entered a phase of ingenious but pedestrian illustrationism involving superimposed layers of realistic drawing...

...No doubt his later work, with its chichi refinements, has tended to taint his credentials as a dues-paying modernist...

...Look," he once announced, "boredom is the worst of maladies and my great despair would be precisely to be taken seriously, to become a great man, a master...

...In his last years, there seemed little chance of that...

...Camfield suggests that the title for one of the pictures, Sweetheart of the First Occupant, carries Picabia's mechanized girlfriend all the way back to Eve, the first woman born without a mother...