{"componentChunkName":"component---src-templates-article-js","path":"/francis-picabia-expanding-horizons-feature-martin-herbert/","result":{"data":{"wordpressPost":{"id":122410,"slug":"francis-picabia-expanding-horizons-feature-martin-herbert","title":"Francis Picabia: Against Bad Breath and Cathedrals of Shit","excerpt":"A carefully crafted waywardness is what continues to make the work of Francis Picabia so relevant today","content":"\n

A carefully crafted waywardness is what continues to make the work of Francis Picabia so relevant today

\n\n\n\n
\"\"
Francis Picabia, c.1924, pencil and ink on paper, 23 x 16 cm. Courtesy Comité Picabia, Paris
\n\n\n\n

Francis Picabia was rarely less than quotable. ‘If you read [French novelist] André Gide aloud for ten minutes, your breath will stink,’ he wrote in 1920. ‘Cubism is a cathedral of shit,’ he announced two years later, giving a scurrilous art blog of the late 2000s its name. Many of the French artist-provocateur’s choicest aphorisms, though, concern his own deliberately wayward, reflexively changeable art practice. ‘Our heads are round to allow our thoughts to change direction’, he wrote in 1922, and – during a 1924 spat with André Breton, a key figure in the Dada that Picabia had by then loudly renounced – ‘When I’ve smoked my cigarettes, I’m not in the habit of keeping the butts’. There’s evidence aplenty of that mindset in Francis Picabia. Expanding Horizons, which opened in May at Hauser & Wirth in London and effectively constitutes a five-decade, 32-work miniretrospective of what Picabia was up to – painting and drawing – when he wasn’t writing/publishing poems, manifestos, novels, plays, film scripts and ad hominem attacks, creating set designs and costumes, collaborating with interior designers, organising fetes and galas themed around subjects such as cannibalism, or driving fast cars and womanising. If showing him in a contemporary art gallery almost frames him as a contemporary artist, it turns out that there’s a persuasive rationale.

\n\n\n\n

Picabia, who lived from 1879 to 1953, is indeed most associated with Dada, but it seems he was a Dadaist long before the movement sprang up. The earliest work in Expanding Horizons is an untitled impressionist landscape from 1902, yet it’s widely thought that Picabia scorned plein air painting in favour of copying from postcards, a harbinger of the longstanding questioning of artistic originality that makes him a precursor of appropriation art (alongside Pop, Conceptualism and ‘bad’ painting). From there on, in the show, we see the artist in all, or most of, his peacock colours. Here is his dauby take on Fauvism. Here, following his move to neutral Switzerland in early 1918 and encountering the Dadaists the following year in Zürich, are delicate examples of the Espagnoles, traditional, Ingres-like portraits of stereotypical Spanish women (with big dark eyes, and often sporting headgear such as classically Catholic mantilla veils) that Picabia pointedly exhibited directly alongside his supermodern, anti-expressive ‘mechanomorphic’ images based on technical drawings of machines in 1920. Here are multiple ‘Transparencies’ from the late 1920s and 30s, involving overlapping painted outlines over a single, denser painted image – multiplicity-as-form – whose style would later so influence postmodernists such as Sigmar Polke, David Salle and Julian Schnabel, and which were sometimes painted over Picabia’s older paintings to devalue them and negate their discarded stylistics.

\n\n\n\n
\"\"
Dada, 1951, ink on paper, 26 x 20 cm. Courtesy Comité Picabia, Paris
\n\n\n\n

Here, too, are seemingly deliberately corny-looking portraits of women and landscapes from the mid-1940s, nudes from the same decade based on softcore porn photographs, gnomic abstractions from a few years later. The show nevertheless elides many of Picabia’s evolutions and pivots: his journeyman progression through Cubism and his brilliantly deadpan mid-1920s figurative paintings accoutred with uncooked pasta, drinking straws, paint-tin lids, feathers, matchsticks, etc; the Art Informel-style, deliberate-looking patterns of isolated dots, of his last years. The latest work in the exhibition, classically combative, is a drawing of a man and a woman apparently mid-fight; circularly, it’s titled Dada (1951). From that brief and fragmentary overview, nevertheless, you might get the sense that Picabia’s chief consistencies are inconsistency, self-cancellation, repudiation and scepticism about modernist notions of forward-moving heroic genius, framed by a larger postwar nihilism that nevertheless didn’t sap his abundant energies.

\n\n\n\n
\"\"
Composition abstraite (Abstract Composition), 1947, oil on cardboard, 90 × 72 cm. Courtesy Comité Picabia, Paris
\n\n\n\n

All of this – the chameleonic inventiveness, the elusiveness – has served to make him a longstanding ‘painter’s painter’, and a figure who has much less of an interpretative industry built up around him than his friend and coconspirator Marcel Duchamp. Rosalind E. Krauss’s 1985 book The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths contains not one reference to Picabia, despite the comparably dismantling thrust of his art; when it was published, there hadn’t been a US retrospective of his work in 15 years, and there wouldn’t be another until 2016. This mixed status for such a seemingly major figure in Modernism might appear, from the outside, like reputational failure: but it’s arguable that Picabia may have wanted it this way all along. He remains, now, present-tense, not overanalysed: a figure whose practice can keep sparking new ideas from its constituent parts, but that might be most meaningful in the deliberately barely graspable dimensions of its whole.

\n\n\n\n
\"\"
Nu de dos devant la mer (Nude from Behind, in Front of the Sea), c. 1942–43, oil on cardboard mounted on canvas, 75 × 53 cm. Courtesy Comité Picabia, Paris
\n\n\n\n

In today’s context, his art is perhaps most pointedly in conversation with the art market and the question of how much artists should repeat themselves. If Picabia was a gadfly, mocking the lucrative idea of the signature style while advertising serial creativity, it admittedly didn’t hurt that he could absolutely afford to survive without sales. (Not that he always did – in 1926, Duchamp organised a slightly dodgy presentation and auction of some 80 Picabias in Paris, claiming they all came from his own collection rather than, more accurately, Picabia’s holdings, so that the latter might have something resembling a public midcareer retrospective.) Picabia’s Cuban-born Spanish father was descended from nobility, the family money coming from a sugar plantation; his French mother was a rich bourgeoise. (Picabia’s interest in the value of a copy seems to have begun early; when he was a child, he later said, he copied paintings in his father’s collection, sold the originals and replaced them with his own versions.) Two things seem, then, to combine in his life and practice: the desire to snipe and criticise and change, and the approximate freedom that came with not relying on the art industry to do so. (My own personal, nonscientific, ancillary theory: Picabia was born – on 22 January 1879 – under the restless, idealistic sign of Aquarius.) The result, anyway, is that his practice as a whole, inflected both by means and personality, can be read as a sustained querying of the value of art. That he fitted best into Dada, the first self-reflexive art movement, makes total sense.

\n\n\n\n
\"\"
Untitled, c. 1911, oil on canvas board, 34 × 38 cm. Courtesy Comité Picabia, Paris
\n\n\n\n

What’s ironic, or appropriate, is how perfectly wrong and bracingly astringent his multifarious, scorched-earth stance is today. Galleries – say, Hauser & Wirth – now routinely expect their artists to make saleable product: so many exhibitions effectively feature one idea turned into variations in whatever colour the collector prefers. Whereas contemporary musicians are expected to have ‘eras’ and to change their style frequently, the overheads of art galleries and the tempestuousness of the market increasingly require the minimisation of risk and the maximisation of branding. (An artist friend of mine, a successful one, said to me not long ago that they were looking forward to ‘retiring and becoming an artist’.) While there are suggestions afoot that being post-medium is the incoming thing, many artists are currently technicians of narrow diversification, singing in their chains. In this regard, a quote from the artist Peter Fischli, who organised a Picabia retrospective at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville in Paris in 2002, seems apropos: ‘[E]very art has its own mission in the time when it is received, and every exhibition that is made should enable a new reading of the work, suited to a different time.’ So here is Francis Picabia in 2026, still present-tense, still relevant and still standing on the sidelines, laughing at us.

\n\n\n\n

Francis Picabia. Expanding Horizons is on view at Hauser & Wirth, London, through 1 August

\n\n\n\n

From the Summer 2026 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.

\n","path":"/francis-picabia-expanding-horizons-feature-martin-herbert/","format":"standard","date":"05 June 2026","rawDate":"2026-06-05T10:44:24.000Z","branch":{"name":"ArtReview"},"author":{"name":"Martin Herbert","path":"/author/martin-herbert/"},"category":{"name":"Features","path":"/category/feature/"},"featured_media":{"source_url":"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/PICAB35266-Self-portrait-web-hires.jpg","caption":"","alt_text":"","media_details":{"width":1637,"height":953,"sizes":{"thumbnail":{"source_url":"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/PICAB35266-Self-portrait-web-hires-300x175.jpg","width":300,"height":175},"medium":{"source_url":"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/PICAB35266-Self-portrait-web-hires-600x349.jpg","width":600,"height":349},"large":{"source_url":"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/PICAB35266-Self-portrait-web-hires-1230x716.jpg","width":1230,"height":716},"wordpress_1536x1536":{"source_url":"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/PICAB35266-Self-portrait-web-hires-1536x894.jpg","width":1536,"height":894},"wordpress_2048x2048":null}}},"acf":{"article_artist":null,"article_video":null,"article_audio":null,"article_collaboration":"","article_custom_html_snippet":"","article_featured_title":"","article_featured_description":"","article_highlight":false,"article_custom_link_url":"","hero_image":null,"seo_title":"Francis Picabia: Art Against Bad Breath | ArtReview","seo_description":"Francis Picabia. Expanding Horizons is on view at Hauser & Wirth, London, through 1 August","article_related_articles":[{"id":121484,"title":"Explore Venice Biennale 2026","path":"/explore-venice-biennale-2026/","author":{"name":"ArtReview","path":"/author/artreview/"},"category":{"name":"Features","path":"/category/feature/"},"featured_media":{"source_url":"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/SEAWORLD-VENICE-2026-©-Nicole-Marianna-Wytyczak_3-scaled.jpg","caption":"Florentina Holzinger, SEAWORLD VENICE, 2026, Florentina Holzinger. © Nicole Marianna Wytyczak","alt_text":"","media_details":{"width":2560,"height":1707,"sizes":{"thumbnail":{"source_url":"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/SEAWORLD-VENICE-2026-©-Nicole-Marianna-Wytyczak_3-300x200.jpg","width":300,"height":200},"medium":{"source_url":"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/SEAWORLD-VENICE-2026-©-Nicole-Marianna-Wytyczak_3-600x400.jpg","width":600,"height":400},"large":{"source_url":"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/SEAWORLD-VENICE-2026-©-Nicole-Marianna-Wytyczak_3-1230x820.jpg","width":1230,"height":820},"wordpress_1536x1536":{"source_url":"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/SEAWORLD-VENICE-2026-©-Nicole-Marianna-Wytyczak_3-1536x1024.jpg","width":1536,"height":1024},"wordpress_2048x2048":{"source_url":"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/SEAWORLD-VENICE-2026-©-Nicole-Marianna-Wytyczak_3-2048x1365.jpg","width":2048,"height":1365}}}},"acf":{"article_collaboration":""}},{"id":121246,"title":"Art, Death, Duchamp","path":"/art-death-marcel-duchamp-moma-new-york-feature-jenny-wu/","author":{"name":"Jenny Wu","path":"/author/jenny-wu/"},"category":{"name":"Features","path":"/category/feature/"},"featured_media":{"source_url":"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/5-Way-Portrait-of-Marcel-Duchamp_2000px.jpg","caption":"Marcel Duchamp, Multiple Portrait of Marcel Duchamp, 1917, gelatin silver print, 9 × 14 cm. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; ADAGP, Paris; Estate of Marcel Duchamp","alt_text":"","media_details":{"width":2000,"height":1219,"sizes":{"thumbnail":{"source_url":"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/5-Way-Portrait-of-Marcel-Duchamp_2000px-300x183.jpg","width":300,"height":183},"medium":{"source_url":"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/5-Way-Portrait-of-Marcel-Duchamp_2000px-600x366.jpg","width":600,"height":366},"large":{"source_url":"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/5-Way-Portrait-of-Marcel-Duchamp_2000px-1230x750.jpg","width":1230,"height":750},"wordpress_1536x1536":{"source_url":"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/5-Way-Portrait-of-Marcel-Duchamp_2000px-1536x936.jpg","width":1536,"height":936},"wordpress_2048x2048":null}}},"acf":{"article_collaboration":""}},{"id":119680,"title":"The Interview: Amar Kanwar","path":"/the-interview-amar-kanwar/","author":{"name":"David Terrien","path":"/author/david-terrien/"},"category":{"name":"Features","path":"/category/feature/"},"featured_media":{"source_url":"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/By-Jonty-Wilde-amar-kanwar-_JW20210-copy-scaled-1-1.jpg","caption":"","alt_text":"","media_details":{"width":1708,"height":960,"sizes":{"thumbnail":{"source_url":"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/By-Jonty-Wilde-amar-kanwar-_JW20210-copy-scaled-1-1-300x169.jpg","width":300,"height":169},"medium":{"source_url":"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/By-Jonty-Wilde-amar-kanwar-_JW20210-copy-scaled-1-1-600x337.jpg","width":600,"height":337},"large":{"source_url":"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/By-Jonty-Wilde-amar-kanwar-_JW20210-copy-scaled-1-1-1230x691.jpg","width":1230,"height":691},"wordpress_1536x1536":{"source_url":"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/By-Jonty-Wilde-amar-kanwar-_JW20210-copy-scaled-1-1-1536x863.jpg","width":1536,"height":863},"wordpress_2048x2048":null}}},"acf":{"article_collaboration":""}},{"id":120530,"title":"The Interview: Steven Soderbergh","path":"/the-interview-steven-soderbergh-henry-roberts/","author":{"name":"Henry Roberts","path":"/author/henryroberts/"},"category":{"name":"Features","path":"/category/feature/"},"featured_media":{"source_url":"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/fBTS_Option8_APPROVED.jpg","caption":"","alt_text":"","media_details":{"width":2000,"height":1125,"sizes":{"thumbnail":{"source_url":"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/fBTS_Option8_APPROVED-300x169.jpg","width":300,"height":169},"medium":{"source_url":"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/fBTS_Option8_APPROVED-600x338.jpg","width":600,"height":338},"large":{"source_url":"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/fBTS_Option8_APPROVED-1230x692.jpg","width":1230,"height":692},"wordpress_1536x1536":{"source_url":"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/fBTS_Option8_APPROVED-1536x864.jpg","width":1536,"height":864},"wordpress_2048x2048":null}}},"acf":{"article_collaboration":""}},{"id":119156,"title":"Tuguldur Yondonjamts’s Animalistic Realm","path":"/tuguldur-yondonjamtss-animalistic-realm/","author":{"name":"Max Crosbie-Jones","path":"/author/max-crosbie-jones/"},"category":{"name":"Features","path":"/category/feature/"},"featured_media":{"source_url":"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/2.-Antipode-falcon-300dpi-copy-scaled.jpg","caption":"","alt_text":"","media_details":{"width":2560,"height":1440,"sizes":{"thumbnail":{"source_url":"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/2.-Antipode-falcon-300dpi-copy-300x169.jpg","width":300,"height":169},"medium":{"source_url":"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/2.-Antipode-falcon-300dpi-copy-600x337.jpg","width":600,"height":337},"large":{"source_url":"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/2.-Antipode-falcon-300dpi-copy-1230x692.jpg","width":1230,"height":692},"wordpress_1536x1536":{"source_url":"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/2.-Antipode-falcon-300dpi-copy-1536x864.jpg","width":1536,"height":864},"wordpress_2048x2048":{"source_url":"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/2.-Antipode-falcon-300dpi-copy-2048x1152.jpg","width":2048,"height":1152}}}},"acf":{"article_collaboration":""}}]}}},"pageContext":{"wordpress_id":122410,"categorySlugs":["feature"]}},"staticQueryHashes":["1047144546","1199547381","1199547381","1200741782","1200741782","2238591713","3764592887","4156135988","753543242","753543242","919364628"]}