Picabia Committee
26 rue Danielle Casanova
75002 Paris
Phone: +33 (0)1 42 60 23 78
Catalogue Raisonné
The four-volume publication is chronologically organized.
The chronology of the volumes is as follows: volume I (1898-1914), volume II (1915-1927), volume III (1927-1939), volume IV ( 1940-1953)
Works not included in the printed volumes will be incorporated into an online volume.
The volumes are available on our publisher's website: mercatorfonds.be
Catalogue Raisonné volume IV
1940 - 1953
This publication, the fourth in an important multi-volume catalogue raisonné of the work of Francis Picabia (1879-1953), includes paintings and a selection of drawings from 1940 to 1952. During the war years, while still residing in the south of France, Picabia was primarily occupied by figural subjects -- multi-figure allegories, female nudes, and glamorous female "portraits" -- painted in bold illusionistic relief. Notorious even in his lifetime, most of these works are now known to have adapted photographic illustrations in older "girly" magazines and other popular media.
Returning to Paris in 1945, Picabia renewed his earlier interests in abstract and non-objective art, still often drawing upon published sources ranging from prehistoric art to Nietzsche, and pursued frequent exhibition of his distinctive, constantly mutating responses to critical currents of the day. These included a series of severely reductive, subtly effective "point" or dot paintings beginning in 1949 -- three years before ill-health effectively ended a half-century of Francis Picabia’sartistic provocation.
Catalogue Raisonné volume III
1927-1939
This publication, the third in an important multi-volume catalogue raisonné of works by the French avant-garde artist Francis Picabia (1879-1953), includes paintings and a selection of drawings made between 1927 and 1939. The innovative collages-paintings and flamboyant figural compositions known as "Monsters" that dominated his output in the mid-1920s gave way to the new artistic directions during 1927. The most important of this was an exploration of the concept of transparency in many forms, first by adding new elements to his own pre-existing works, then by developing more complex compositions, known precisely under the name of “Transparencies” superimposing outlined figures, animals, plants, and other motifs of various origins. However, Picabia's characteristic refusal of stylistic consistency endured. His production during this period also encompassed imposing representational compositions with firmly contoured and solidly coloured forms, thickly painted topographical landscapes, curvilinear abstractions, and, towards the end, represented characters inspired by photographs, which announce his notorious nudes of the early 1940s.
Catalogue Raisonné volume II
1915-1927
The second of an important multi-volume catalogue project, this publication features work by Francis Picabia (1879-1953) that dates from 1915 into mid-1927. Beginning with Picabia's elaboration of a personal machinist aesthetic, the book continues by looking at the artist's central role in the formulation of the Dada movement in Paris. That irreverent movement included Picabia's increasingly provocative mechanomorphic compositions, complemented by his unorthodox writings and graphic designs as well as socially powerful performances. The volume finishes with a look at Picabia's creations of the mid-1920s, which included memorable collages and flamboyant figurative compositions known as the "monsters".
This volume offers scholarly readings of his work by major authors; illustrations of each work accompanied by informative details; a chronology; and comprehensive list of exhibitions and publications.
Catalogue Raisonné volume I
1898-1914
This publication is the first of a planned four-volumes catalog raisonné of works by Francis Picabia, one of the most significant and challenging artists of the 20th century. Volume 1 range from Picabia's early works in the late 1890s and his carrer as an impressionist to his cubist and abstract paintings of 1912-1914, which are landmarks in the history of modern art. This volume offers scholarly readings of his work by major authors; illustrations of each work accompanied by informative details; a chronology; and comprehensive list of exhibitions and publications.
Other Publications
Prenez garde à la peinture...
Et à Francis Picabia!
DVD set
Directed by Rémy Ricordeau
After having, with his friend Marcel Duchamp, decreed the death of art, Francis Picabia has become an essential reference in the eyes of those who are interested in the history of modern art and its relationship to freedom._cc781905- 5cde-3194-bb3b-136bad5cf58d_
“Our head is round to allow thought to change direction,” he said. His humor should be taken seriously: the coherence of his approach resides in fact in his insatiable curiosity and his immoderate taste for speed and play, this desperate thirst for life which did not put up with any conformism or no other rule than that of the desire to experience everything.
If he was also a writer, poet and car enthusiast, life in all its excesses was in his eyes preferable to his work; and the game of passions to the morbidity of dogmatisms.
This film thus sets out to retrace the life of Francis Picabia by underlining the importance of his singularity in the intellectual and artistic history of the 20th century.
Album Picabia
The Picabia Album is an inspiring artistic chronicle of the life of Francis Picabia(1879–1953), as seen by his last_cc781905-5cde-3194-6_bad5 wife and wife Olga Mohler Picabia. Started in 1936, four years before their marriage, and left unfinished in 1951, two years before Picabia's death, this album is a collection of_cc781905-5cde-3194- bb3b-136bad5cf58d_memories, sketches, newspaper clippings, photographs and notes illustrating the public and private lives of the artist with as much admiration as affection.
By its richness, this account visual rendering reveals all the depth of one of the most remarkable and least known_cc781905-5cde-3194-bb3b-136_bad5cf58d_romantic and creative complicities of the xx century.
Aujourd'hui pense à moi
Francis Picabia, Ego, Image
Aurélie Verdier - Les presses du réel
“I am nothing, I am Francis Picabia”. It is in this tension between exaltation and rejection of the self that the artist has indicated his position in modernity. His refusal of collective action was expressed at the heart of the Great War in a work centered not on history or on plastic problems, but on the self. A conceptual character of the avant-garde, ego is linked to the analysis that Sigmund Freud made in 1915 of melancholy, understood as a pathological imitation of mourning and as the loss of the self. This work strives to revise some of the best established certainties about the artist - such as his refusal of repetition and his taste for contradiction - to propose seeing in ego a capital actor in the history of modern forms, producer of his own ruptures. Covering a period that goes from Orphism in 1913 to the maximalist painting of Monsters in 1924-1927, the first part analyzes the portrait, the stain and the proper name as three "objects of the self" in Picabia, breaking with the traditional representation of the subject and authorial codes. A second part examines three examples of the painter's procedures: first, with the omnipresence of the round in his work, this sign of an uncertain ego matches another circularity, attributed to melancholy and mania. Then, Picabia's ambivalent relationship to the figure of Picasso is considered as an alternative to the idea of influence. Finally, it is from the secret reuse that the artist made of mechanical images that arises Picabia's reactionary response to the threat of a mechanization of art disavowed in his speech, but identifiable everywhere in the work.
Francis Picabia,
rastaquouère
Bernard Marcadé - Flammarion
“In his fifty years of painting, Picabia has consistently avoided clinging to any formula or wearing any badge. He might be called the greatest exponent of freedom in art, not only against the slavery of the academies, but also against submission to any dogma. »
These remarks by Marcel Duchamp underline the profoundly libertarian dimension of the man who liked to call himself an “artist of all kinds”.
This chaotic, contradictory course, made of permanent back and forth between abstraction and figuration, geometry and biomorphism, dreamlike and realism, cannot be apprehended in a simply formal way. It remains difficult to identify a Picabia style or manner. What a biographical approach allows us, on the contrary, to understand is precisely a certain constancy in attitude. This son of a family “born without a mother”, with particularly pronounced luxury tastes and a troubled mental and conjugal life, is indeed not short of a contradiction. Francis Picabia abhors nothing so much as the ideal of purity and intransigence that he sees emerging in his Dadaist friends and even in André Breton.
Picabia loves life too much to allow himself to be locked into a belief or a certainty, even if they are avant-garde. Until his death, our "Funny-Guy" will remain faithful to this state of mind, which refers more to a way of life than to a strictly artistic program.
What could pass for a series of denials and regressions is in fact only a way of saying yes to life, to its wanderings and its contradictions. Francis Picabia is the artist who made his honey of this "death of art" so often proclaimed during the XXᵉ century. “Because I am the only one who, after the death of Art, did not inherit it; all the artists who follow his procession and wander around the world figured in his will; me, he disinherited me, but he thus left me free to say whatever comes into my head and to do what I please. »
BM