Artist · 13 prints
Francis Picabia Prints
About Francis Picabia
Francis Picabia was a French painter, poet and provocateur, born in Paris in 1879 to a Spanish father and a French mother, and died there in 1953. He studied at the École des Arts Décoratifs and with academic painters including Fernand Cormon, then made his name with Impressionist landscapes. From around 1908 he moved quickly through Fauvism and Cubism into abstraction, and in 1913 he showed at the Armory Show in New York and had a solo exhibition at Alfred Stieglitz's 291 gallery.
Francis Picabia never stayed with one style for long. From 1915 he made his "machinist" works, cool diagrams of engines, spark plugs and gears that stand in for people and feelings, such as Very Rare Picture on Earth (1915) and The Child Carburetor (1919). In Barcelona in 1917 he launched the magazine 391, and with Marcel Duchamp and others he became a leading figure of Dada, the anti-art movement, in New York and Paris, before turning against it in 1921. Later he returned to figurative painting. His work is held by the Guggenheim, MoMA, Tate and the Centre Pompidou.
Francis Picabia prints: reproductions of paintings and drawings by the French artist Francis Picabia, from his early abstraction and Dada work to his figure paintings of the 1930s. Works in the collection include La Source (1912), Da-da 4-5 (1919), Iris (1929), Trois Mimes (1936) and Femme au masque (1938).
This selection follows Picabia across several of his styles. It includes the 1912 abstraction La Source, Dada pieces, and a group of 1929 paintings, Iris, Ligustri and Rubi, from his Transparencies period, in which figures and plants are layered on top of one another. The later works show masked women, mimes, bathers and a Spanish poet in strong outlines and bold colour.
The bold figure paintings suit living rooms, studios and offices; the layered 1929 works sit well in a study or bedroom where they can be seen up close. All prints are museum-quality reproductions, available unframed or framed with low-glare acrylic glazing, with free shipping and import duties covered.
