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Francis-Marie Martinez Picabia
(January 22, 1879 - November 30, 1953) France

Francis Picabia

Painter and poet

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Francis Picabia was born François Marie Martinez Picabia in Paris, of a Spanish-Cuban father ( who was an attaché at the Cuban legation in Paris) and a French mother. He was enrolled at École des Beaux-Arts and École des Arts Decoratifs in Paris from 1895 to 1897.

He began to paint in an Impressionist manner in the winter of 1902-03 and started to exhibit works in this style at the Salon d'Automne and the Salon des Indépendants of 1903. His first solo show was held at the Galerie Haussmann, Paris, in 1905. From 1908, elements of Fauvism and Neo-Impressionism as well as Cubism and other forms of abstraction appeared in his painting, and by 1912 he had evolved a personal amalgam of Cubism and Fauvism. Picabia became a friend of Guillaume Apollinaire and Marcel Duchamp and associated with the Puteaux group in 1911 and 1912.

From 1913 to 1915 Picabia traveled to New York City several times and took active part in the avant-garde movements, introducing modern art to America. These years can be characterized as Picabia's proto-Dada period, consisting mainly of his portraits mécaniques.

Later, in 1916, while in Barcelona he started his well-known Dada periodical 391, in which he published his first mechanical drawings. He continued the periodical with the help of Duchamp in America. Picabia continued his involvement in the Dada movement through 1919 in Zürich and Paris, before breaking away from it after developing an interest in Surrealist art. Again he changed his style in 1925, when he moved to Mougins and returned to figurative painting.

During the 1930s, he became a close friend of Gertrude Stein. In the early 1940s he moved to the south of France, where his work took a surprising turn - he produced a series of paintings based on the nude and glamour photos in French "Girlie" magazines, in a garish style which appears to subvert traditional, academic nude painting. Before the end of World War II, he returned to Paris where he resumed abstract painting and writing poetry.

He had love affairs with male dancers whom he painted. "I see again in my memory my dear udnie" for example, is a painting and an ode to a dancer he was involved with. A large amount of his work involves the mechanical representation of people.

A large retrospective of his work was held at the Galerie René Drouin in Paris in the spring of 1949. Picabia loved fast automobiles and is said to have owned as many as one hundred and fifty of them. Francis Picabia died in Paris and was interred in the Cimetière de Montmartre.

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Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - et alii

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