I Am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose, and Provocation

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"Francis Picabia's raucous early Dada poems dare the unprecedented and traffic in the sheer possibilities of abstract shimmering gesture. His late aphorisms are startling bolts of congealed thought. Marc Lowenthal has done the history of radical modernist poetry a great service by bringing these works of exquisitely offbeat taste and intoxicating élan into English. His translations of the turbulent work of this "freeloading angel" show uncanny skill and welcome verve."--Charles Bernstein, Donald T. Regan Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania

(Charles Bernstein )

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The Artwork Caught by the Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris (October Books)

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The artist Francis Picabia--notorious dandy, bon vivant, painter, poet, filmmaker, and polemicist--has emerged as the Dadaist with postmodern appeal, and one of the most enigmatic forces behind the enigma that was Dada. In this first book in English to focus on Picabia's work in Paris during the Dada years, art historian and critic George Baker reimagines Dada through Picabia's eyes. Such reimagining involves a new account of the readymade--Marcel Duchamp's anti-art invention, which opened fine art to mass culture and the commodity. But in Picabia's hands, Baker argues, the Dada readymade aimed to reinvent art rather than destroy it. Picabia's readymade opened art not just to the commodity, but to the larger world from which the commodity stems: the fluid sea of capital and money that transforms all objects and experiences in its wake. The book thus tells the story of a set of newly transformed artistic practices, claiming them for art history--and naming them--for the first time: Dada Drawing, Dada Painting, Dada Photography, Dada Abstraction, Dada Cinema, Dada Montage. Along the way, Baker describes a series of nearly forgotten objects and events, from the almost lunatic range of the Paris Dada "manifestations" to Picabia's polemical writings; from a lost work by Picabia in the form of a hole (called, suggestively, The Young Girl) to his "painting" Cacodylic Eye, covered in autographs by luminaries ranging from Ezra Pound to Fatty Arbuckle. Baker ends with readymades in prose: a vast interweaving of citations and quotations that converge to create a heated conversation among Picabia, André Breton, Tristan Tzara, James Joyce, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and others. Art history has never looked like this before. But then again, Dada has never looked like art history.George Baker is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles, and an editor at October magazine and October Books. He is the editor of James Coleman (MIT Press) and a frequent contributor to Artforum.

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Francis Picabia

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Francis Picabia his art, life, and times

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Francis Picabia: 1879 - 1953

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Francis Picabia: Late Works 1933-1953 (Art in the Nineties)

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This lavish title focuses for the first time on Picabia's late work consisting mainly of nudes, which is a break from the Dadaist work for which history has lauded him.

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The early dadaist Francis Picabia (1879-1953), perhaps best known for his "machinist" works, is now thought of as a prescient practitioner of the kind of pictorial freedom we have come to call postmodernist. Criticized for leaving the dada movement, for denouncing surrealism, and for painting whatever he wanted (including a lot of truly schlocky nudes), Picabia was forever breaking away from the jaws of fame, theory, or sterile stylistic "integrity." One is reminded of Philip Guston's response to the art-world uproar over his "defection" from abstract expressionism: "This is not a team sport, guys." In the not-so-distant past, Picabia was scathingly denounced for the kitschy cheesecake paintings of his midcareer that he copied from photos in European men's magazines. Accused of Nazism as well as pornography, Picabia was ultimately "forgiven" by apologists who argued that he needed money during the war. But this new book, which includes three excellent essays and a host of color plates, makes it clear that every aspect of Picabia's oeuvre, from the most modern and respectable to the most clumsy or embarrassing, is a manifestation of his multifaceted personality, expressed with the utmost honesty. Picabia was a ladies' man, a powerful proponent of instinct, of "getting ever more deeply in touch with an interior world," as he wrote, and a serious artist. By the end of his life Picabia had invented a highly personal, suggestive symbolism to bridge the gap between eros and art. We breathe a sigh of relief at the late abstract works, having been forced by this challenging book to traverse the rough terrain Picabia took to arrive there. --Peggy Moorman

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