Word: picabia
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...movement, such as it was, had only one (relatively) heavyweight American in its membership, the painter, photographer and objectmaker Man Ray. Its spirit was best exemplified by two foreign artists who enriched the New York scene by visiting it--the Frenchman Marcel Duchamp and the French-Cuban Francis Picabia. Their impact goes back to the far-famed Armory Show of modern art, held in 1913, which first gave a mass American audience a chance to see modernism...
...modern art. A century has passed since Joris-Karl Huysmans, the "decadent" novelist, invited the reader to see the workings of an engine as "steel Romeos inside cast-iron Juliets"; the idea of a "desiring machine" has been explored by a lot of art since then, from early Picabia and Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), through the Surrealists in the '30s, and so down...
...what the French called la belle matiere, and when he did essay it -- as in a series of pseudo-pastoral kitsch- classical paintings in the manner of Renoir, done during World War II -- he subverted it; these hot, sluglike nudes are of a brutal vulgarity exceeded only by late Picabia, who may in fact have influenced them...
...contemporary Sigmar Polke -- whose uneven but brilliant retrospective is now finishing its run at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, and affords the utmost contrast to the work of his New York imitator -- Salle learned about hand painting his mass-media source images. And from the late paintings of Francis Picabia, he extracted (as Polke did, much more inventively) the banal mannerism of painting figures and things as though they were transparent, drawing them over the top of other things and figures...
...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...