Word: picabia
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...from the image haze that envelops us, with some T. and A. for signature. Its "relevance" consists only of the accuracy with which it mirrors the inattentiveness of a culture benumbed by television. Its main debts are to James Rosenquist, for the big, juxtaposed image fragments, and to Francis Picabia, for the unassimilated layering of outline images over solid ones in that painter's late, wretchedly bad paintings. But where appropriation is concerned, it is not etiquette to speak of debt...
...second mode is eclectic quotation from the image-haze, like a distracted viewer spinning the TV dial. Its leading practitioner in the U.S., among those born after 1950, is David Salle, 32. His main compositional device, putting emblems over a tangle of "transparent" figures, came straight from late Francis Picabia and perhaps from Salle's German contemporary Sigmar Polke. There is also a strong debt to earlier James Rosenquist. Salle draws, or rather traces, awkwardly and flatly. His imagery mimics the nullifying influence of TV, its promotion of derisive inertia as the hip way of seeing. Underneath, a congealed eroticism...
Taboos are made to be broken; one sees today why Pearlstein was interested in an artist so totally unlike himself, the Dadaist Francis Picabia, who conceived his work as a constant affront to received taste. Painting the studio nude, Pearlstein declared allegiances very different from those common in the New York art world of the late '50s. In neither hedonism nor irony nor self-expression, he wanted to go back and start from Gustave Courbet, painting the naked body in a spirit of detached, colloquial reportage, as though all the proscriptions against figure painting had lost their magic...
...little bare now," apologizes Baron Guy de Rothschild, 72, waving his hand at the empty black lacquered walls of his office on the seventh floor at 21 Rue Laffitte in Paris. Indeed, the art works by Bernard Buffet and Francis Picabia have been packed away, and out front workmen are getting ready to chisel the famous family name out of the sandstone above the entryway. Reason: the Banque Rothschild is being nationalized by the socialist government of French President François Mitterrand, along with the country's other major banks and holding companies. The Rothschilds, who are stepping...