Francis Picabia GORGONS IN DISGUISE: PICABIA'S WOMEN by Donald Kuspit

It’s much more interesting to paint women than apples, as Francis Picabia’s late paintings strongly suggest, and to paint them in a

sort of illustrational manner -- in a casual, cliché-ridden populist style, with its simplistic realism and readability -- strongly

suggesting that Cézanne-esque modernism and such avant-garde “experiments” as Cubism had run their course, and amounted to “nothing,”

as he implies in his 1920 “Dada Manifesto.”
“Cubism represents the dearth of ideas,” he wrote, adding “They have cubed paintings of the primitives, cubed Negro sculptures, cubed

violins, cubed guitars, cubed the illustrated newspapers, cubed shit and the profiles of young girls, how they must cube money!!!”(3)

His late paintings put the finishing dismissive touches on this attack on Cubism, more broadly on modernism and abstraction.
The exhibition at Michael Werner Gallery has some residual abstract works, a Composition (ca. 1940), with its eccentric curves,

sometimes forming colorful circles, and Untitled (1948), with its green angles on a black ground, which have a certain passé charm.

But much more alarmingly charming, not to say insidiously seductive, are the blondes in Femme au Bouquet (1942) and La Blonde (ca.

1940-46) and the brunettes in Femme au châle bleu (ca. 1940-44) and Portrait de Suzanne (1941), among other female figures, some

looking forlorn, one matter-of-factly posing nude.
Perhaps most noteworthy is the sexy woman, wearing a bathing suit and wrapped in a white sheet or large beach towel, flaring in the

wind, in Printemps (1942-43) -- Picabia’s profane, sexually exciting answer to Botticelli’ s sacred, virginal, untouchable Venus (ca.

1482). Picabia has come a long way from his Cubo-Futurist I See in Memory My Dear Udnie (1914) and his early Machine Portraits -- but

there’s still something mechanical about his painting and imagery, and ironical.
An atmospheric change had occurred in art during the long night that had fallen on Europe during World War II, and Picabia’s art was

the first to register it. His last paintings were ironically ahead of their times, for they acknowledge the collapse of esthetically

“aristocratic” avant-garde art (the high art of modernity, with its uncommon visual language) and the rise of esthetically

“democratic” popular art (the illustrational people’s art of modernity, with its commonplace visual language).

Avant-garde art tried to appropriate and assimilate it, whether by way of Picasso’s Cubist collages or Max Ernst’s Surrealist

collages, and whether out of ironical condescension or to announce that it was open to all “influences,” and thus universal. But

populist representation, with its instant appeal, eventually overwhelmed it, taking it over and aggrandizing it for its own purposes,

as is shown by Pop Art, an ironically “high” crowd art, as it were. Anti-elitist Pop Art wrote “finish” to School of Paris elitist

avant-garde style, which lingered on in the postwar School of New York. But I think the key to their identity is hidden in three

rather tiny oil paintings -- one is 4 x 3¼ inches, two are 3¼ x 2½ inches -- titled Tableau de poche (1942). These “signature”

paintings can be read as stages in the surrealization of the female face. Initially quirkily familiar, it is distorted into

expressionistic monstrousness, and finally transformed into intimidating grotesqueness. The blackness of its eyes becomes

increasingly intense, as though to penetrate us, and what began as a closed mouth ends in a grimace with a wide-open mouth, as though

to swallow us.

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