Francis Picabia on a white wall, all incorporating shades of blue, black, and white, with the central piece titled Villejuif (1951) portraying a figure in a blue outfit with a white head covering and wing-like shapes.” width=”970″ height=”647″ data-caption=’An installation view of “Éternel Recommencement” at Hauser & Wirth in Paris. <span class=”lazyload media-credit”>Courtesy Hauser & Wirth</span>’>
Francis Picabia’s creative life was implicated in plural art movements, from Impressionism to Cubism to Dada to Orphism. The exhibition “Éternel Recommencement” (“Eternal Beginning”), on view at Hauser & Wirth’s two-story Paris space before it moves to the gallery’s 22nd Street location in New York on May 1, encompasses more than forty works made during his final years, from 1945 to 1952, spotlighting the French artist’s little-examined late-in-life output produced during the unstable après-guerre period—an era that ushered in an irrevocable loss of normativity and a collective urgency to start fresh in the wake of unparalleled sociopolitical crisis and violence.
During an exhibition walkthrough, art historian and professor Arnauld Pierre—who co-curated the show with Beverley Calté, president of the Comité Picabia—noted that Picabia’s “œuvre is very uneven and hard to categorize.” In the exhibition catalog, he clarifies that “Picabia—a man at ease with ‘new departures,’ and accustomed to surprising audiences with a change of direction every five years or so—was more than familiar with the repeated demands for the radically new.”
The artist’s wartime-era nudes are worlds away from this nonfigurative era, articulated in rough surface textures. In this, Picabia aligned himself with vernacular art produced by marginalized figures, whether that ‘marginalization’ was cultural or psychological in scope. In the catalogue, Pierre points out that Picabia leaned, in his late years, “toward pictograms, primordial symbols, and archetypal emblems,” adding that “the anthropology of images tends to associate with animist and totemic cultures, that is those without the deep split between nature and culture characteristic of the modern West.”
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Pierre doesn’t qualify this as a form of appropriation; he notes that “Picabia’s art was safe from this kind of nationalistic recuperation, insofar as his source was far more specific and, furthermore, foreign. He drew specifically on Romanesque art from Catalonia.” Pierre does admit, however, that “Picabia’s borrowings after 1945 are never as clear as those in earlier works.” In the Hauser & Wirth space, he described Picabia’s work as ambivalent, biomorphic, primitivist, prehistoric and “grumeleux” [gritty, lumpy], with a tinge of Surrealism, and also occasionally veering towards the “vulvar.”
Picabia’s second wife Olga Mohler saved assorted review clippings of her spouse’s work; these are compiled in the catalogue. Critic Henry Mcbride wrote that Picabia’s “recent paintings, concerning themselves with round spots floating against flat backgrounds, are by no means so simple as they look… In these occult arrangements of Picabia, there is painting quality, too.” McBride quotes from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, rebroadcasting Gertrude Stein’s observation that, “Picabia had conceived and is struggling with the problem that a line should have the vibration of a musical sound and that this vibration should be the result of conceiving the human form and the human face in so tenuous a fashion that it would induce such vibration in the line forming it.” (Incidentally, Stein also said that the “surrealists are the vulgarization of Picabia as Delaunay and his followers and the futurists were the vulgarization of Picasso.”)
These allusions to musical vibrations and occult arrangements cohere with the works on view: gestural paintings fortified by a frisky pulsation. On the ground floor, Elle Danse (She Dances) has a swingy vivacity of movement and choreographic possibility embedded into the undulating shapes of the 1948 painting’s bright blues and blushing pinks. The 1946 oil on canvas Maintenant et Autre Fois (Now and Then) feels, by comparison, more aligned with the primitivism Picabia permitted himself to borrow from. So, too, does Le Marié (The Groom), a mustard-hued oil on cardboard painting from 1951 scored with white shapes and black lines, abstractly depicting marital commitment (something Picabia himself was not known for; he was a reputed lothario).
Upstairs, Symbole (Symbol), an oil on plywood work from 1950, shows two vertical lines of dots—an energized assortment of red, white, black, blue and purple—whimsically placed against a calm lilac-and-periwinkle background. Across the room, the 1951 oil-on-wood, Villejuif, is the most figurative in the show, featuring a nurse or an angelic figure or both, inspired by a period of hospitalization at the end of Picabia’s life. The woman’s face, enveloped in white, has barely any features—the eyes, nose and mouth mere lines—and two blue shapes (wings?) emerge from behind the figure’s neck. The body itself is crouched as if penitent.
Some of Picabia’s titles borrowed from writings by Nietzsche—like Instinct of Truth to Safeguard Life, a dark oil on canvas painting from 1952 dabbed with seven dots, the citation scrawled atop the canvas in French (“Instinct de vérité pour conserver la vie”). Another oil-on-canvas dot painting from 1949 is titled Cynicism and Indecency. His ensemble of abstracted compositions speaks to that sinister precarity of the post-war era, as well as the underpinnings of the unconscious and the mystical made manifest on the canvas.
“Éternel Recommencement” is on view at Hauser & Wirth in Paris through March 16, 2025.
