Broderie

The Dada spirit really only existed between 1913 and 1918... In wishing to prolong it, Dada became closed... Dada, you see, was not serious... and if certain people take it seriously now, it's because it is dead!...'One must be a nomad, pass through ideas like one passes through countries and cities.' (Francis Picabia, quoted in André Breton 'After Dada', Robert Motherwell, ed. The Dada Painters and Poets, London, 1989, p. 201)

Painted for a major exhibition of his work held in Barcelona in the winter of 1922, Broderie (Embroidery) is a painting dates from the crucial period in Picabia's career when, abandoning Dada, he effectively set out on his own deliberately erratic and uniquely individual path of creativity. Playfully mixing classical figuration, abstract art, humour and a sense of artifice and of optical illusion, Broderie belongs to a unique group of works made in 1922 that both mock and ape many of the prevailing avant-garde tendencies of this time while simultaneously asserting Picabia's own independence from them. Executed at a time when Dada in Paris was caught up in an in-fighting that would slowly evolve into the formation of the Surrealist movement and where elsewhere its protagonists were allying themselves with abstract artists and constructivists in the pursuit of an elemental art, Picabia, set about, in these new works, creating an integrated and wide variety of styles that both parodied and transcended these developments. As he proudly declared: 'There are people who don't like machines. I offer them Spanish women. I will make them French ones...Yes I make paintings to sell. And I am amazed that those I like the most are the ones that sell least...Art is customarily considered an alchemy. Each artist is a mold. I aspire to be many. One day I'd like to write on the wall of my house: Artist in many genres.' (Francis Picabia, 1922, quoted in John Elderfield (ed.) Dada in the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2008, p. 249)

With its gently amusing title seemingly somehow mocking the earnestness of the painter's art, Broderie is one of a large number of paintings that Picabia made on paper for the first major exhibition of his work after deciding to leave the Paris Dada group. In the spring of 1922, he and Germain Everling had visited Barcelona and arranged for an exhibtion of his work to take place there in the winter of the year at the gallery of his old friend Josep Dalmau. This exhibition, Esposition Francis Picabia opened on the 18th November 1922, Breton wrote the preface for the catalogue and gave an important lecture on the current state of contemporary art at the Ateneu Barcelones on November 17. In a letter two months before the opening Dalmau had asked Picabia to bring the works he wanted to show to Barcelona by car in order to avoid transportation costs. As a result Picabia brought 47 works on paper and cardboard and at least three drawings on glass that were not listed in the show inventory.

Apart from a few paintings of Spanish women, the paintings on show at this exhibition were remarkably homogeneous in style, all being a strange meta-mechanical series of puzzling near-abstractions - a convoluted mixture of diagrammatic, geometric form and figurative illustration. In works such as Broderie, Radio Concerts and Otophone I, which a photograph of the exhibition shows all hanging alongside one another, Picabia mixed abstract form and coloured nudes in a clearly personal version of the 'elemental' art then being pioneered by Arp, Hausmann, Van Doesberg, Moholy-Nagy, Schwitters and other artists of the newly formed Dada-Constructivist axis. As some other of Picabia's paintings in the exhibition, such as Mercury, Strongroom, Astrolabe Grinder and Pump illustrate, the geometry and abstraction of these paintings appear to have been derived from a mixture or sources ranging from Picabia's own earlier machine paintings, diagrams of astrolabes and other tools and apparatus. The title of the painting Optophone for example, refers to an apparatus which converts light into a variation of sounds so that a blind man can perceive them. It referred to an area of optico-acoustic research, then being investigated by Raoul Hausmann who in 1922 was abandoning painting in favour of this direction with the aim of giving 'a single form to the vibrations of light and sound'. (Raoul Hausmann. Optophone, Ma, 15 Oct, 1922). Picabia's Optophone I in contrast, had a colourful classical nude woman reclining at the heart of its target-like pattern of concentric circles. Instead of offering a fusion of sound and light, it presented an image that visualised the idea, by creating a fusion of opposites in the form of geometrical abstraction and academic drawing.

This same principle is at work within Broderie, where the seemingly abstract patterning of a decorative design motif, in the form of a fleur-de-lys-like series of arabesque lines, interlaces with two classical-looking figures rendered also - in colourful silhouette - as abstract patterns. In an early simultaneous layering of form that anticipates his later Transparency paintings, roderie, therefore, seems to offer a new homogenous art that embraces both elemental abstraction and the renewed classicism of the apparent 'return to order' within an integrated, playful, and whimsical whole, that, in the end, can be described as nothing other than Picabia-esque.