Word: picabia
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...exhibition at London's Tate Modern features three heavy hitters, the Frenchmen Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia, and the American Man Ray. They are associated with the Dada and Surrealism movements, but they were friends before these existed, and after they ended. Of the three, Duchamp is the towering genius. Out of his own interests, phobias and distractions, he created a new aesthetic that has survived to become the reigning spirit of today's art world. Its key idea is that anything can be a work of art. Everyone has encountered this notion. No one quite knows what it means...
...object untransformed, just presented in a gallery and given a title. Andy Warhol ran with this idea in the 1960s, and so do Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst today. Art students are in awe of it. It was Duchamp who invented this concept, and his friends Ray and Picabia remained fascinated by it all their lives, even if they didn't wholly practice it; Ray used a lot of different materials, from photography to collage, and Picabia was always a painter, if a weird...
...Subversion Of the three artists, Picabia was the oldest by eight years. He was 32 when he met Duchamp in 1911. (Duchamp later said he was impressed both by Picabia's high standing in the Paris art world and by his daily intake of opium.) Ray and Duchamp were friends by 1916, when they both started working for an avant-garde art gallery in New York City; Ray was 26, Duchamp 29. Picabia was born into a wealthy family, inherited a fortune and lived the life of a playboy. Duchamp, the son of a notary, was brought...
...actual painted sphere is just a few rooms away. Her husband and frequent collaborator, Jean Arp, is seen with a monocle-like disk over his left eye - the Dadaists, fascinated with mechanization and also repelled by it, often used geometric shapes in their art. Another photograph shows Francis Picabia at the wheel of an open-topped sports car. Picabia used the same image in an assemblage also on view. He pasted the photograph on canvas, drew a similar sketch of himself at the wheel and titled the work The Merry Widow. It was not meant to make sense. After...
Currin isn't the first artist to work at the intersection of art and trash. The kitsch shenanigans of Jeff Koons have been a major inspiration for him, and so has the later work of Francis Picabia--those painstaking oils from the 1940s that Picabia copied from naughty photographs. But in the mid-'90s Currin began to introduce old master borrowings into his work, at first conflating them with soft, pillowy porn, then working them into more conventionally scaled nudes and lately scattering them into satires of life among the well dressed and well fed. His art-history references come...