dadaism

1916 - 1924
Began in neutral
Switzerland in WWI

Also big in Paris.

Reached its peak between
1916 1924

Anti Art

A movement against rigidity
of society and art, and the
barbarity of war the
public didnt deserve art
after the war.
Dadaism
Francis Picabia
Machine Turn
Quickly
1916-1918
Francis Picabia
Feathers
1921
Francis Picabia
Chapeau de
Paille
1921
Francis Picabia (18791953)
Lasbien, 1941-1942, private collection, oil on canvas
Francis Picabia
Once known as 'Papa Dada,' Francis Picabia was one of the principle figures in
the Dada movement both in Paris and New York. A friend and associate of Marcel
Duchamp, he became known for a rich variety of work ranging from strange,
comic-erotic images of machine parts, to text-based paintings that foreshadow
aspects of Conceptual art
Mature PeriodBy 1912, Picabia shifted to the more radical style of Cubism, painting from his memories and experiences rather
than drawing inspiration from nature

After WWI Picabia left France to seek refuge in Barcelona, then New York and the Caribbean. The war pushed him to find yet
another style that would represent the era of industrialization. He showed the first of his machine paintings in 1916 at the
Modern Gallery in New York.
Dada
Francis Picabia (1879-1953)


Francis Picabia - The Cacodylic Eye - 1921
Art is everywhere except with the dealers of Art, in
the temples of Art, like God is everywhere, except in
the churches.


Use of readymades objects with emergence of the Dada movement.


In the way that WW1 was a shock in its killing and bloodshed, Dada was also
meant to shock. Had mission to subvert existing aesthetic standards

Duchamps fountain, a deconstruction of sculpture and a sculpture - Picabias eye is
a deconstruction of painting and a painting.

)


Dada
Francis Picabia (1879-1953)


Francis Picabia
Portrait of a Young American Girl in the State of Nudity 1915
Picabia defended the painting on the grounds that it was about
choice - and was a direct attack on painting and its pretensions to
represent the unique, coherent vision and identity of the artist

In the same way as Portrait of a Young American Girl in the State
of Nudity - Printed in Picabias magazine 291 - a kind of
illustrative readymade - taken from a drawing in a technical
manual - metaphor of a woman and a spark plug was considered
scandalous - hard, sharp, mechanical but eternal - main purpose
to spark


Picabia always had a fascination with popular imagery, often
employing it as a means to undermine the grave seriousness and
formal concerns of modern art. In this painting, part of a notorious
series of realistic and erotic nudes that he painted in the early 1940s,
he used pin-ups from 1930s "nudie" magazines. Though many believe
they were painted for money (they were sold through an agent in
Algiers), his close friends have maintained that Picabia always painted
what he wanted, and that they cannot be dismissed as anomalies in
his career. Curators after the war often did put them aside in favor of
celebrating Picabia's Dada years, yet since the 1980s these pictures
have been an important influence on artists
Women and Bulldog
KEY IDEAS
Picabia learned early on that abstraction could be used to evoke not only qualities of machines, but also to evoke mystery and
eroticism. This ensured that abstract painting would be one of the mainstays of his career. He returned to it even in his last years,
during which - as he had always done - he attributed his inspiration to the obscure recesses of his mind.
Figurative imagery was central to Picabia's work from mid 1920s to the mid 1940s, when he was inspired by Spanish subjects,
Romanesque and Renaissance sources, images of monsters, and later nudes found in soft porn magazines. Initially he united
many of these disparate motifs in the Transparency pictures
Picabia was central to the Dada movement when it began to emerge in Paris in the early 1920s, and his work quickly
abandoned many of the technical concerns that had animated his previous work. He began to use text in his pictures, and
collage
But, as you know, I have surpassed this stage of development and I
do not define myself at all as a cubist anymore. I have come to
realise that one cannot always make cubes express the thoughts of
the brain and the feeling of the psyche.
Francis Picabia, 1913, New York (Comment je vois New York)


One has said of Picasso that he studies objects in the way a
surgeon dissects a cadaver. We do not want these bothersome
cadavers anymore which are called objects.
Francis Picabia, Manifeste de lEcole Amorphiste, 1913, Camerawork, New York


Socialism has only been invented for the mediocre and the weak.
Can you imagine socialism or communism in Love or in Art? One
would burst into laughter if one were not threatened by the
consequences.
Francis Picabia, Francis Picabia contre Dada ou le Retour a la Raison, 1927, Comoedia