This lavish title focuses for the first time on Picabia's late work consisting mainly of nudes, which is a break from the Dadaist work for which history has lauded him.
The early dadaist Francis Picabia (1879-1953), perhaps best known for his "machinist" works, is now thought of as a prescient practitioner of the kind of pictorial freedom we have come to call postmodernist. Criticized for leaving the dada movement, for denouncing surrealism, and for painting whatever he wanted (including a lot of truly schlocky nudes), Picabia was forever breaking away from the jaws of fame, theory, or sterile stylistic "integrity." One is reminded of Philip Guston's response to the art-world uproar over his "defection" from abstract expressionism: "This is not a team sport, guys." In the not-so-distant past, Picabia was scathingly denounced for the kitschy cheesecake paintings of his midcareer that he copied from photos in European men's magazines. Accused of Nazism as well as pornography, Picabia was ultimately "forgiven" by apologists who argued that he needed money during the war. But this new book, which includes three excellent essays and a host of color plates, makes it clear that every aspect of Picabia's oeuvre, from the most modern and respectable to the most clumsy or embarrassing, is a manifestation of his multifaceted personality, expressed with the utmost honesty. Picabia was a ladies' man, a powerful proponent of instinct, of "getting ever more deeply in touch with an interior world," as he wrote, and a serious artist. By the end of his life Picabia had invented a highly personal, suggestive symbolism to bridge the gap between eros and art. We breathe a sigh of relief at the late abstract works, having been forced by this challenging book to traverse the rough terrain Picabia took to arrive there. --Peggy Moorman