The Final Years of Francis Picabia (1945-1951)

The final years of Francis Picabia’s career, from 1945 to 1951, have long been overlooked, yet they reveal a consistent thematic and formal approach. Even in his late period, Picabia remained committed to rupture and reinvention. In early 1945, he shifted toward abstraction, engaging with postwar artistic debates. While his return to Paris brought growing recognition, it was also marked by declining health and financial instability. His relationships with dealers, critics, and close acquaintances played a role in these changes, though in elusive ways. Throughout, Picabia maintained an unwavering belief in painting as an evolving and subjective practice, free from utility but not from irony.

A cerebral hemorrhage in 1944 left Picabia physically weakened, reinforcing his Nietzschean fascination with death as both an existential and creative force. Erotic and mythological motifs—long central to his work—became entwined with themes of artistic fecundity. His paintings from this period reflect a world seen as absurd and governed by blind forces, expressed through ideographic signs, archaic symbols, and layered imagery. Often, sexual motifs were embedded beneath vibrant decorative surfaces, tempering their rawness.

Picabia’s late abstraction was singular, setting him apart from his contemporaries. He drew inspiration from prehistoric, African, and Oceanic art, incorporating spirals, broken lines, and disks into his compositions—symbols reminiscent of early human mark-making. Ochres and blacks evoked the aesthetics of indigenous art, a fascination encouraged by his friends Henri Goetz and Christine Boumeester. This dialogue between ancient and modern reinforced his idiosyncratic visual language.

Contrary to the perception of isolation, Picabia remained engaged with contemporary artistic circles. He hosted regular gatherings at his studio with figures like Goetz, Boumeester, Atlan, Ubac, and younger artists such as Soulages and Mathieu. His 1949 retrospective, 50 Ans de Plaisirs, at Galerie René Drouin, celebrated his career with 136 works and a catalogue designed in his signature spirit of disorder. Despite this success, a burglary at his home on the eve of the exhibition left him penniless.

Among the exhibited works was Le Viol, a late painting that encapsulates the aesthetic and conceptual concerns of his final years. The work is executed over an earlier, more dispersed composition, traces of which remain visible in the interstices of the design. This work seems to encapsulate Francis Picabia’s distinctive approach to abstraction, merging elements of figuration with a playfully ambiguous and
layered technique. The use of oil on cardboard with thick, textured paint showcases not only his experimentation with material but also his ability to blur the boundaries between the recognizable and the unrecognizable. The colorful linear patterns that shift toward abstraction suggest a fluid transition, where
humor and irreverence intersect, reflecting his post-modernist sensibilities.

Picabia’s exploration of shapes that could either be read figuratively or abstractly highlights his critique of artistic conventions and traditions. The earthy tones, especially ochres and deep browns, create a sense of primitive energy, evoking the ancient, while the physicality of the surface gestures toward the spontaneous, almost visceral quality of Art Informel. This tension between attraction and repulsion is a profound feature of the work, reflecting the complex and often contradictory nature of human interactions.

Francis Picabia

Francis Picabia (b. 1879, Paris – d. 1953) remains one of the most elusive figures of the 20th century. From Impressionism to radical abstraction, his career was marked by relentless reinvention. By 1915, he pioneered his machinist period within the Dada movement, working alongside Marcel Duchamp, only to denounce Dadaism a few years later. His oeuvre defied categorization, oscillating between provocation, pseudo-classicism, and photo-based realism.

Born into wealth, Picabia studied at the École des Arts Décoratifs and immersed himself in Paris’s avant-garde circles. He believed paintings should capture emotion rather than nature, a philosophy that drove his continuous stylistic shifts. Briefly engaging with Surrealism, he later distanced himself, rejecting artistic dogma in favor of experimentation.

Though overlooked in his final years, Picabia’s work gained renewed attention through a 1975 Grand Palais retrospective and a 2016 MoMA survey. Today, his irreverent, boundary-defying approach is recognized as a precursor to postmodernism, influencing generations of artists.