The Brooklyn Rail

More than forty-five years ago, William A. Camfield, the foremost authority on the work of Francis Picabia, wrote a major monograph on the artist and, in the last chapter of the book, told his readers that work produced by the artist in the final years of his life had been misunderstood and, consequently, disparaged. He then warned us, however, that it was an attitude that would likely change in the future. “With rare exceptions, critics and collectors have ignored or denigrated these works of Picabia’s old age,” he wrote. “That condition is subject to change for these poorly known, very uneven paintings (and poems) express in some instances a character and gravity which transcend his work in any period.” Uncovering that transcendence seems to have been the goal of the Comité Picabia headed by Beverley Calté, who helped organize Francis Picabia: Eternal Beginning, a show that opened at the Hauser & Wirth Gallery in Paris in the spring and traveled to its location in New York for the summer months of 2025.

Camfield is an art historian who devoted the better part of his career to studying the work of Francis Picabia, having completed his Ph.D. on the artist at Yale University in 1964, organized the first major American retrospective of his work for the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1970, wrote the monograph quoted above in 1979, and, finally, served as a leading member of the Comité Picabia that produced the magisterial catalogue raisonné on the artist issued in four impressive volumes from 2014 through 2022. It is in the last volume of this publication that the works in this exhibition are fully catalogued, but it is only in the Hauser & Wirth exhibition and its accompanying catalogue where the paintings can be carefully studied and examined as a group, an opportunity that is both informative and illuminating. To begin with, every artist who sees this show and knows what it is like to labor over a painting for an extended period of time—particularly those who work in an essentially abstract idiom—will fall in love with the textures of these pictures, which are as immediate, present and physically tactile as pigment strewn across any surface can ever be. Candace Clements, who works with Camfield and the Comité Picabia, wrote an essay for the catalogue where she demonstrated that many of the pictures had been repainted, and, under raking light, the outlines, tracings and, essentially, palimpsests of the original paintings can still be discerned. This inherent quality of the late paintings gives them the impression of being alive, that is to stay, still vibrant and active as the underpainting becomes evident and slowly reveals itself to the viewer.

One painting in this show exemplifies the degree to which Picabia relied upon the precedent of his own earlier work, while at the same time advanced its precepts into entirely new directions. The large and imposing Elle danse [She Dances] from 1948 is just under five feet in height and, as Clements points out in her essay, was inspired by the rediscovery of paintings by the artist from his Dada period, Udnie (Young American Girl; Dance) and Edtaonisl (Ecclesiastic), both major paintings from 1913 that had been damaged from years of having been rolled up and placed in storage, but which Picabia found and restored at this time. The process of working on these pictures invigorated Picabia’s faith in painting, and led him to create at least three large-scale canvases, one of which is Elle danse, which, Clements tells us “centers on buoyant forms evoking both dancer and dance.” In her essay, Clements reproduced an X-ray of the painting, which shows it was painted atop an earlier “mechanomorphic” painting dating from the Dada years, a bold and conscious decision on Picabia’s part to obliterate an earlier work and replace it with a new vision of how the subject of dance (shared by Udnie) can be visually interpreted. This time, however, it is possible that Picabia infused his rendition with a subtle echo of Picasso’s painting of a similar subject in Three Dancers, from1925 (Tate Gallery, London), where a figure with outstretched arms occupies a similar space as that of the white figure in the center of Picabia’s painting.

Arnauld Pierre, French art historian and another member of the Comité Picabia, contributed an essay to the catalogue that situates these late paintings within the complicated artistic milieu of Paris in the postwar period. Picabia found himself at the center of a group of younger Parisian artists who tried to find a mediating ground between the prevalent artistic styles of the day: Surrealism and abstraction. In his essay, as he has in many others over the years, Pierre cited specific sources that Picabia used that form the basis of his paintings. In this case, he demonstrates that the diagram of an engraved bone amulet from a book published in 1913 appears in a painting from around 1945 and shows that details of diagrams made from cave paintings reproduced in the same book appear in several canvases from the mid-forties. Pierre was the first art historian to write extensively of the so called “point” paintings by Picabia that were shown as a group at the Galerie des Deux-Îles in Paris in 1949, paintings that to this very day possess a freshness in appearance that gives the impression that they were made by a young contemporary painter, not a seventy year-old French artist in the late phases of a long career. Exactly what those points mean is a matter of conjecture, one that Pierre believes exemplifies the old Dada trope of art vs. non-art. Today they appear like detailed views of our cosmos, lights flickering from distant stars in a spatial dimension rendered entirely in monochrome pigment. One thing is certain: No matter how they are seen, those points come at the end of Picabia’s career, thereby metaphorically representing the placement of a period at the end of a long but intricate and complex extended sentence.

For those familiar with Picabia’s work, they know that he evolved through successive stages of complete stylistic transformations, each of which began and ended somewhat abruptly: Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Dadaism, abstraction, transparencies, naturalistic nudes, to this last phase of reinvestigating the possibilities of non-figurative art after the war. He will always be remembered in the history of art for his pioneering excursions into abstraction and for his mechanical paintings during the heyday of Dada, but these paintings from the last phase of his production are increasingly gaining interest. They reveal the restless mind of an aging artist who is trying to come to terms with everything that came before, not only in his own work, but in the entire history of art.

Just as Picabia drew from these precedents to his work, the art historians of today rely heavily upon the pioneering efforts of those who came before them. Clements and Pierre built upon the first serious study of Picabia advanced by Camfield as a doctoral student some sixty years ago. When these late works by the artist were shown in the exhibition Camfield organized for the Guggenheim in 1970, a critic no less influential than Lawrence Alloway (who was the first to use the word “Pop” to describe works of art in the sixties derived from popular culture) dismissed them as “inconsequential.” Times have changed. They change the way we think about the works of art we look at and try to comprehend. Picabia himself expressed it best when he famously wrote in 1922: “Our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction.”