Francis Picabia: His Art, Life and Times by William A. Camfield (review)

78 Books Francis Picabia: His Art, Life and Times. William A. Camfield. Princeton Univ. Press, Princeton, 1979. 366 pp., illus., $44.00. Reviewed by Louise Campbell" Camfield says that his original intention was to produce a traditional art historical monograph on Picabia. Since no reliable chronology existed for his artworks, he decided to supply one and, also, as he became convinced of the unity of Picabia's life and art, a certain amount of biographical information and some consideration of his writings. Camfield approached his task in scholarly fashion, charting the influence on Picabia's works by Impressionism, NeoImpressionism . Fauvism and Cubism. It is when Picabia became involved with Marcel Duchamp and, subsequently. with the Dada group in Switzerland that the author's approach is put to the test. I find that one needs to know more than he tells about the personality of the artist and the milieu in which he lived to understand paintings such as 'Le Lierre unique eunuque'; exhibited at the Paris Salon des Indepcndants in 1920. The shift in Picabia's orientation that occurred just before World War I and that makes his subsequent work appear so idiosyncratic may be superficially described as a shift away from Cubism to Dadaism. Yet, what a complex aesthetic, philosophical and personal change the pictures of 1913 suggest. Accompanying his works to the Armory Show in New York City that year, Picabia was struck by the vitality of life in this City. In particular, he was intrigued by the ideas of the photographer Stieglitz and the aesthetician de Zayas that the camera could serve an essentially objective, recording function in society, leaving the visual artists free to concentrate upon depicting their subjective states. Back in Paris that spring, Picabia produced a pair of 2.75 x 2.75 m canvases, 'Edtaonisl' and 'Udnie', which he described as 'Memories ofAmerica. evocations from there which, subtly opposed like musical harmonies, become representative of an idea .....'. In contrast to his works of 1912. such as 'Danses iJ la Source I', which, based on a memory of a figurative image. is tied to the cubist approach to depicting forms with facetted planes and to a certain concern with depicting movement, these are altogether more difficult to analyze. The picture 'Edtaonisl (ecclesiastique)' it seems was inspired by an incident during Picabia's visit to the U.S.A. His remembrance of the dancer Napierkowska in a practice session covertly observed by a Dominican priest is transposed into a depiction of a cluster of pale, succulent forms on a gold ground, upon which dark spirals and curvaceous. brightly coloured forms encroach. 'Udnie (jeune fille americaine: danse)' offers a still more generalised evocation of the 'Udnic' cabaret and of the rhythms of its band. In 'Je revois en souvenir ma chere Udnie' of 1914, Picabia depicts his female subject this time in terms of a fleshy but unidentifiable organism, whose title reinforces a play on words (Udnie-s-nudite). Revisiting New York City in 1915. Picabia attempted to make explicit relationships between human and mechanical functioning . with which he and Duchamp were then concerned, by producing a series of portrait drawings and elaborate collages that incorporate pictures in advertising and technical manuals. On his return to Paris, he disturbed the post-World War I art world with his views by means of pamphlets, magazine articles. 'mechanomorphic' paintings and ones that seemed designed to challenge the regulations of the Salons as to what constituted an artwork. Picabia gradually detached himself from his former dadaist friends and from the younger generation of writers clustered around Andre Breton. Yet the directions that Picabia's work subsequently took (the 'monsters' of 1924-27 and the 'transparencies' of the 1930s) are. I find. effective interpretations of surrealist ideas: the superimposition of disparate approaches to pictures of the past and of the present: the use of calligraphy and of diverse materials for making a picture: the blend of mythological and private meaning of what is seen. Alas, he abandoned this approach for one that was increasingly simplified: brief excursions into depicting landscapes and erotic • 17 Duke St.. Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, England. 'pin-ups' of the I940s were followed by a final period...