The Brooklyn Rail

One of Francis Picabia’s first art crimes was to produce Impressionist paintings that were based on photographs—and make money doing it—a perfect start to the scattershot anti-retinal agenda that Dada would exploit and his compatriot Marcel Duchamp would elevate to doctrine. None of the now-canonical artists who were working in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century had clean hands when it comes to messing around with art, especially painting, but Picabia’s work time and time again demonstrates that he never needed a coconspirator because he was his own gang. “FRANCIS PICABIA N’EST RIEN,” bellows from a handbill he produced in 1921, but the scope of this current exhibition reinforces what the 2016–17 Kunsthaus Zürich/MoMA retrospective asserted with thoroughness and vitality: then, now, later, Picabia was, is, will be everything.

This exhibition, perfectly situated in Beverly Hills, brings together paintings from 1924–49 that riff on a far-from-accidental array of divergent images of women. The earliest paintings, from his series aptly known as “Monsters,” fulfill the terms of what was once called Primitivism. Well, not so fast. Monstre (Vénus et Adonis) (ca. 1924–27) and La femme au chien (ca. 1925–27) are both painted rather roughly. The two deities in the former, as well as the human and dog in the latter, are painted bodies with white body paint that functions both as pictorial highlighting as well as a doubling (or doubling down) on top of the primary body that Picabia manhandled his entire career: the actual painting itself. And, all the while, even modernism be damned.

Nowhere are Picabia’s rejection and resistance more present in this exhibition than in a remarkable painting called Têtes (ca. 1930–34). During a conversation held during the opening, artist Richard Hawkins and art historian George Baker spoke about it looking like it had been burnt in an oven, its craquelure looking more like it occurred in a meth lab after a fiery explosion. The portrait that emerges through its chunks is not dissimilar to others like those in Papion (ca. 1936–38) and Sans titre (ca. 1934), both of which revisit the “transparency” of an earlier, airily painted canvas, Briseis (ca. 1929). Calling this weird painting surrealist is not enough; in this exhibition, it stands apart as the only image that looks as if it might float away, whereas Têtes looks like the aftermath of an immovable object meeting an irresistible force.

It is well understood that Picabia ran roughshod against chronology, not to mention development and tradition, over the span of his output. One key thing this does is enable (if not justify) paintings like Mère et enfant (ca. 1937) and Maternité bleue (1936–38) and how their status as images of religious motherhood plays across his interests and schemes. (Well, the first painting is more Addams family than Madonna and Child, but still.) Both paintings are nearly ninety years old, and they seem to have gotten weirder. This, of course, is the legacy of Picabia overall, and this exhibition reasserts what the 2016–17 retrospective brought home: there remains something about his work that sets it apart from the usual calming effect of time and distance that has prevailed in the work of any of his contemporaries. I’m convinced this is because there are ways in which each Picabia work contains every other Picabia work, no matter when or how it was made, but attempting to prove this is a fool’s errand, and I think he was up to something that made that the case.

It is quite perverse that the most cohesion to be found amongst this group of paintings comes from the paintings of models and actresses. Don’t misunderstand: they still diverge from each other, but the overall impact of them has been made extra ambivalent one block west of Rodeo Drive. Yes, that is Marlene Dietrich in La résistance (ca. 1943–44, and that title!), and yes, it single-handedly devours the nineties work of John Currin, but what it does best is challenge the other “cheesecake” pictures like Femme au châle vert (ca. 1940–41), its death stare taking on the rest of the room, including us. The cohesion, however, is likely another ruse, another productive ploy to upend even the most pervasive and pernicious category of “women” in art. Picabia may have once written, “In order to have clean ideas, change them as often as your shirt,” but his hands were surely always pretty filthy.