Francis Picabia

About

Picabia played a key role in introducing Dada to New York during WWI stays (1913-1915), exhibiting mechanomorphic machine paintings that satirized industrialization and bourgeois values, such as Universal Prostitution (1916-19). Known as 'Papa Dada,' he promoted the movement in Paris with Breton and Tzara but split in 1921, exploring cinema, photography, and later Transparency series in the 1920s blending classical motifs with abstraction. In the 1930s-40s, amid personal turmoil including marriages to Gabrièle Buffet (divorced) and Olga Mohler (1940), he produced commercial realist nudes from magazines during WWII in southern France, before returning to abstraction in Paris until his death.

Avant-garde with kaleidoscopic shifts: Impressionism, Cubism, Orphism, Dada mechanomorphs, Surrealist transparencies, abstract and realist nudes