Dada's fastest engine — machine portraits, the journal 391, and the scenario for Entr'acte, dashed off on Maxim's letterhead for the ballet Relâche.
Francis Picabia was a French painter, writer, filmmaker and magazine publisher, born in Paris on 22 January 1879 to a French mother and a Cuban father of Spanish descent. He moved through Impressionism, Cubism, machine drawing, Dada, near-Surrealism, kitsch figuration and late abstraction, changing styles so often that critics settled on one word for the career: kaleidoscopic.
His engine was money, speed and refusal. Rich by inheritance, the owner of 127 sports cars across his lifetime, Picabia could afford to be the only Cubist who sailed to New York's 1913 Armory Show, where the press made him modernism's spokesman. His machine portraits of 1915 onward turned people into spark plugs and cameras, and his travelling journal 391 carried Dada between Barcelona, New York, Zurich and Paris. When Dada calcified he denounced it, writing that if you want clean ideas, change them like shirts. His 1924 ballet Relâche came with a film in the interval, Entr'acte, which he scripted and a young René Clair shot.
He returned to abstraction after the Second World War and died in Paris on 30 November 1953, aged 74. He is buried in the Montmartre Cemetery, and his monster paintings and Transparencies, long dismissed, now look prophetic.
Francis-Marie Martinez Picabia was born in Paris on 22 January 1879. His father, a Cuban of Spanish descent, served as attaché at the Cuban legation in Paris. His French mother died of tuberculosis when the boy was five, leaving him an inheritance that later made him far richer than any painter he ran with. The talent showed early and crookedly: at fifteen he copied his grandfather's collection of Spanish paintings, swapped his copies for the originals, and sold the originals to fund his stamp collection.[1]
He trained at the École des Arts Décoratifs under Fernand Cormon, in the same academy that had taught Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec, and lived by painting from the age of twenty. His first mature manner, from 1903 to 1908, was Impressionism learned from Alfred Sisley, lanes, riverbanks, wash houses and barges, so faithfully that critics called him a copyist. The accusation stung him out of the style, the first shedding of many.
From 1909 Picabia painted with the artists about to be called Cubists. In 1911 he joined the Puteaux Group at Jacques Villon's studio, where he met Marcel Duchamp, the decisive friendship of his life, and became close to the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. His huge abstract compositions, La Source at the 1912 Salon d'Automne, then Udnie (1913), pushed Cubism toward pure colour and motion. In 1909 he married the critic Gabriële Buffet, whose intelligence steered the whole circle; the marriage produced four children and lasted, tumultuously, to 1930.
In 1913 he was the only member of the Cubist circle who could afford to attend the Armory Show in New York, where he had four paintings hanging. With the American press hostile and hungry, the one available Cubist became modern art's spokesman in every paper, and Alfred Stieglitz gave him a solo show at his gallery 291. Back in Paris he broke with the Cubists; in June 1915, landing in New York en route to Cuba on a molasses errand, he simply stayed, and sat out the war he had been mobilised for.
New York's machinery gave him his most famous idea: the portrait mécanique, people drawn as devices. A spark plug labelled as an American girl, Stieglitz as a broken camera, himself as an automobile horn. The machine style, developed in dialogue with Duchamp, ran nearly a decade. In Barcelona in 1916, among refugee artists, he founded 391, the restless Dada journal he published wherever he happened to be. In Zurich, where he had gone for treatment of depression and suicidal impulses, he met Tristan Tzara, whose radicalism electrified him.
Paris Dada formed around him: André Breton, Paul Éluard, Philippe Soupault and Louis Aragon at the Certa bar in the Passage de l'Opéra, with Picabia as financier, publisher and chief provocateur. He quit the movement he had helped build, denouncing Dada in 1921 as it hardened into a church, and fired a parting attack on Breton in the last issue of 391 in 1924. That December he staged the ballet Relâche at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, with a filmed interlude he had scripted, Entr'acte, shot by the twenty-six-year-old René Clair, with Picabia, Duchamp and Man Ray on screen. It became one of the most famous avant-garde films of the decade.[2]
In 1925 Picabia turned back to figures with the garish, deliberately ugly Monster paintings, and from 1927 to 1930 layered Renaissance images over popular-culture figures in the Transparencies. Both series baffled his contemporaries and became touchstones later; the German painter Sigmar Polke built openly on the Monsters. In the 1930s he became a close friend of Gertrude Stein, painting her portrait in 1933, and in June 1940, on the day the Germans took Paris, he married Olga Mohler and moved south.
The wartime work was his strangest: paintings copied from the nude photographs of French girlie magazines like Paris Sex-Appeal, in a slick, lurid style that reads as sabotage of academic nude painting. Some were sold through an Algerian dealer and ended up decorating North African brothels under the Occupation. After the war he returned to Paris, to abstraction and to poetry, and a large retrospective at the Galerie René Drouin in 1949 reopened the account.
Picabia died in Paris on 30 November 1953, aged 74, in the city where he was born, and was buried in the Montmartre Cemetery. His health had been poor since the New York years, when dropsy and tachycardia, drink and drugs first caught up with him. Gabriële Buffet-Picabia, his first wife, outlived him by more than three decades, decorated for her work in the French Resistance.
Picabia's method was serial desertion. Impressionism, Cubism, orphic abstraction, machine drawing, Dada typography, monsters, transparencies, pin-ups, dots: he worked each vein exactly as long as it stayed disreputable and left the moment it earned respect. The one constant is attack, on seriousness above all, delivered with a rich man's independence; he never needed a dealer's approval or a movement's shelter, and burned both repeatedly.
The machine portraits distilled him best: found technical diagrams recopied and mislabelled as people, mechanical drawing as wit. The magazines were works in the same spirit, 391 above all, with its typographic riot and its aphorisms. The most quoted of them is his self-justification for the style changes: if you want to have clean ideas, change them like shirts.
For decades after his death Picabia was filed as Dada's rich amusing uncle, essential to the movement's history but secondary as a painter, with the late figurative work dismissed as decline. The revaluation began when painters of the 1960s onward, Polke among them, treated exactly those styles, kitsch, appropriation, deliberate bad taste, as prophecy. Major retrospectives, including the Museum of Modern Art's in 2016, resettled him near the century's centre.
His works hang in the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, Tate in London and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The marriage that shaped the early career has its own afterlife: Anne Berest's novel The Postcard (2021) and Gabriële (2025), written with her sister Claire Berest, retell Gabriële Buffet-Picabia's life, including the long triangle with Duchamp.
Born in Paris on 22 January to a French mother and a Cuban diplomat father.
At fifteen, copies his grandfather's Spanish paintings, swaps the copies in, and sells the originals to fund his stamp collection.
Begins five years of Impressionist landscape in the manner of Alfred Sisley, close enough that critics call him a copyist.
Marries the critic Gabriële Buffet and moves toward the painters soon called Cubists.
Joins the Puteaux Group, where he meets Marcel Duchamp and Guillaume Apollinaire.
The only Cubist to attend the Armory Show in New York; Stieglitz gives him a solo show at 291.
Stays in New York on a molasses errand to Cuba and begins the machine portraits.
Founds the journal 391 in Barcelona; in Zurich, meets Tristan Tzara while seeking treatment for depression.
Denounces Dada as it hardens into orthodoxy, and attacks Breton in 391's final issue three years later.
Stages the ballet Relâche with the film Entr'acte, scripted by Picabia and shot by René Clair, in its interval.
Begins the garish Monster paintings, followed by the layered Transparencies of 1927–30.
Paints the portrait of his friend Gertrude Stein.
Marries Olga Mohler on 14 June, the day the Germans take Paris, and moves to the south of France.
The Galerie René Drouin mounts a large Paris retrospective.
Dies in Paris on 30 November, aged 74, and is buried in the Montmartre Cemetery.
Painting · Orphism
A tall canvas is packed with shapes that look half like machine parts and half like the inside of a body: pistons, coils, a ribbed cream fan and soft pink curves, in browns, pinks and greys. Francis Picabia painted the picture in Paris in the summer of 1914 and wrote its title along the bottom. The painting hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Painting · Dada
L'Œil cacodylate, The Cacodylic Eye, is a big grey canvas covered with handwriting: names, jokes and dedications by about fifty of Francis Picabia's friends, with a few pasted photographs and one painted eye. Francis Picabia painted the eye and the title in 1921, while he was ill with an eye infection, and invited his visitors to write the rest. The canvas hung over the bar of Le Bœuf sur le Toit and now belongs to the Centre Pompidou.
Painting · Dada
A carburettor drawn like an engineer's diagram, in gold leaf, black and white on a bare orange-brown plywood board. Francis Picabia labelled its parts with nonsense phrases such as Sphere of Migraine and Destroy the Future, and called the picture The Child Carburetor. He made it in 1919, and it belongs to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Painting · Dada
A black silhouette of a naked man with a pointed masked face stands with one foot on a black ball. A single green leaf covers his groin, and red letters round the ball spell DESSIN FRANÇAIS, French drawing. Francis Picabia painted the picture in 1922 over a machine painting that had caused a scandal in Paris the year before. The Fig-Leaf belongs to Tate in London.
Painting · Orphism
A whirl of flat grey, white, blue, green and pink shapes fills a canvas three metres wide. Francis Picabia painted Udnie in Paris in 1913, after watching a dancer rehearse on the ship that took him to New York. He showed the painting at the Salon d'Automne that November. Udnie belongs to the Centre Pompidou.
Met · 1930–1953
In the 1930s Picabia became a close friend of Gertrude Stein and drew encouragement from her at a low point in his critical standing. He painted her portrait in 1933, one modernist shape-shifter taking the measure of another.
Supported by · 1924
Picabia wrote the scenario for Relâche in 1924 and, for its interval, the film Entr'acte that de Maré's company had René Clair direct.
Collaborated with
Duchamp and Picabia were close from around 1911 and central to Dada in New York and Paris, sharing its machine imagery and its attack on artistic seriousness. Picabia's review 391 and the pair's transatlantic activity carried Dada between the two cities.
Collaborated with · 1924
Picabia wrote the scenario for Entr'acte and handed it to Clair, then twenty-six, to film. It ran between the acts of Picabia's ballet Relâche at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in December 1924, and both men appear in it.
Picabia's first successful manner, from 1903 to 1908, was Impressionist landscape taken straight from Alfred Sisley: small churches, lanes, riverbanks, wash houses and barges. Critics questioned his originality by naming the debt outright, and the discomfort of painting in a dead man's style helped push him toward Cubism and everything after.
Art movement · c. 1916–1924
Bridge between the New York, Zurich and Paris wings — his machine drawings, reviews and defections shaped every phase of the movement.
Francis Picabia (1879–1953) was a French painter, writer, filmmaker and magazine publisher, one of the founders and financiers of the Dada movement. He moved restlessly through styles, Impressionism, Cubism, the machine portraits, Dada, the Monster paintings, the Transparencies, wartime pin-ups and late abstraction, published the travelling Dada journal 391, and wrote the scenario for the 1924 film Entr'acte. Rich by inheritance, he owned 127 sports cars and answered to nobody, which is much of why the work looks the way it does.
Three things. The machine portraits begun in 1915, in which people become mislabelled technical diagrams, a spark plug as an American girl, Stieglitz as a camera. The journal 391, Dada's most mobile publication, issued from Barcelona, New York, Zurich and Paris between 1917 and 1924. And Relâche with its film interlude Entr'acte (1924), which he scripted for René Clair to shoot, one of the most famous avant-garde films ever made, with Picabia, Duchamp and Man Ray on screen.
By conviction, and because he could afford to. His own explanation became his most famous sentence: if you want to have clean ideas, change them like shirts. He left every style at the moment it became respectable, Impressionism when critics placed it, Cubism after the Armory Show made him its spokesman, Dada in 1921 as it turned doctrinaire. An inherited fortune meant he never depended on dealers or fellow artists, so no style ever held him. Critics have settled on the word kaleidoscopic for the result.
Financier, publisher, connector and provocateur. His journal 391, founded in Barcelona in 1916, carried the movement's spirit between continents. His meeting with Tristan Tzara in Zurich linked the Swiss and Paris wings. In Paris, the Dada circle of André Breton, Paul Éluard, Philippe Soupault and Louis Aragon formed partly around his energy and his money. Then he blew it up, denouncing Dada in 1921 as a new orthodoxy and attacking Breton personally in 391's last issue in 1924.
Paintings made between 1927 and 1930 in which several images are layered over one another like superimposed film frames, figures from High Renaissance art seen through and behind figures from contemporary popular culture. Contemporaries mostly shrugged; later painters and curators read them as an early form of the appropriation and layering that defined much art after the 1960s, and they are now among his most studied works.
He died in Paris on 30 November 1953, at the age of 74, after several years of declining health, and was buried in the Montmartre Cemetery. He had returned to Paris before the end of the war and spent his last years painting abstractions and writing poetry, with a 1949 retrospective at the Galerie René Drouin as the final public summing-up in his lifetime.
Met · 1930–1953
In the 1930s Picabia became a close friend of Gertrude Stein and drew encouragement from her at a low point in his critical standing. He painted her portrait in 1933, one modernist shape-shifter taking the measure of another.
Associated with
Bridge between the New York, Zurich and Paris wings — his machine drawings, reviews and defections shaped every phase of the movement.
Supported by · 1924
Picabia wrote the scenario for Relâche in 1924 and, for its interval, the film Entr'acte that de Maré's company had René Clair direct.
Collaborated with
Duchamp and Picabia were close from around 1911 and central to Dada in New York and Paris, sharing its machine imagery and its attack on artistic seriousness. Picabia's review 391 and the pair's transatlantic activity carried Dada between the two cities.
Collaborated with · 1924
Picabia wrote the scenario for Entr'acte and handed it to Clair, then twenty-six, to film. It ran between the acts of Picabia's ballet Relâche at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in December 1924, and both men appear in it.
Influenced by · 1903–1908
Picabia's first successful manner, from 1903 to 1908, was Impressionist landscape taken straight from Alfred Sisley: small churches, lanes, riverbanks, wash houses and barges. Critics questioned his originality by naming the debt outright, and the discomfort of painting in a dead man's style helped push him toward Cubism and everything after.
The sources below include biographies, scholarly essays, interviews, and primary materials that informed this page. They reflect both the historical record and ongoing critical conversations about Francis Picabia and their work.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Francis Picabia page.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Francis Picabia page.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Francis Picabia page.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Francis Picabia page.
Reference article cross-checked for the chronology, the style periods, the marriages, and the death.
These references anchor the page in the documented record and in the scholarly conversations around Francis Picabia. Every claim on this page traces back to one or more of the works listed here.
Explore more resources
