Francis Picabia

From the Files

+ When Picabia was 15, he copied his father’s collection of Spanish paintings and then, without his father’s knowledge, substituted the copies for the originals, which he sold to finance his stamp collecting.

+ In 1926 Marcel Duchamp bought a group of 80 pieces by Picabia to flip at auction, turning a profit of roughly 10 percent.

+ In 1990 the Parisian auctioneer Guy Loudmer sold Picabia’s La petite Udnie, 1913–14, for F24 million ($4.1 million), which still stands as the artist’s record.

+ There is some interest in Picabia’s early Pissarro like paintings among Impressionist collectors, who have driven such works as Saint-Tropez, effet de soleil, 1909—which brought £612,800 ($1.1 million) at Sotheby’s London in 2006—past the $1 million mark.

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Some artists make work with an eye on the market. Then there’s Francis Picabia. In the first few years of the 20th century, his hazy, sun-dappled landscapes, reminiscent of Camille Pissarro’s, enjoyed great success and were the subject of three solo shows at the illustrious Galerie Haussmann, in Paris. But by 1909, Picabia—following his iconoclastic instincts, not to mention the avant-garde currents of the time—had begun toying with abstraction, and the prestigious Parisian dealers decided they wanted nothing to do with him. He was dropped from Galerie Haussmann, which put around 100 of his Post-Impressionist paintings up for auction at Hôtel Drouot.

That would not be the last time the marketplace found itself buzzing with his work. In the first 10 months of 2008, likely fueled by recent scholarship and a sense that Picabia’s time has finally come, Christie’s, Sotheby’s and smaller Parisian auction houses offered nearly 100 pieces—including such diverse examples from his oeuvre as Mi, 1929, an oil and crayon “transparency” painting featuring overlapping images of women, limbs, birds and flowers, which sold at Christie’s London in February for £1.36 million ($2.7 million), and La Sainte Vierge, a 1920 inkblot that looks more like a dragonfly than the Virgin Mary, which brought €326,000 ($521,000) at Hôtel Drouot. A range of canvases from the 1930s and ’40s has also surfaced of late, commanding six-figure prices.

“Despite his Dada roots, Picabia continued to paint throughout his life,” says Gordon VeneKlasen, a partner in Michael Werner Gallery, of New York and Berlin, a longtime dealer of the artist’s work. “Even though painting is such a traditional medium, he continued to try to make it original.”  

Born in 1879 in Paris to a father of aristocratic Spanish descent and a mother from the French haute bourgeoisie (who died of tuberculosis when he was seven), Picabia always had a small fortune at his disposal. His family money enabled him to study at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, in Paris. It also allowed him to travel extensively, across the Atlantic, for example, to attend the 1913 Armory Show in New York, where he ended up staying several months. He spent considerable time on the French Riviera and had enough cash to collect cars, yachts—and women: Over the course of his lifetime, Picabia had three wives, two formally sanctioned and one common-law, as well as numerous mistresses.

Perhaps most signficantly, his wealth freed him from depending on his painting for income. “He had enough money not to have to please his constituents or collectors, and as a result he did not have to develop a style that was recognizable over time,” says the Dada scholar and New York dealer Francis Naumann. “He went from Impressionist paintings to abstraction to Dada and so on, liberated from having to make work that would accumulate in value. And that’s one of the things that made him great.” Naumann believes Picabia resembled his confrere Marcel Duchamp in this respect.

But there is a key difference between Duchamp and Picabia. For philosophical reasons, Duchamp stopped making work around 1925, while Picabia continued painting, drawing and writing poetry until close to his death, in 1953. So as much as he bucked the market, Picabia left behind plenty of material to feed it.

Most experts name three periods as Picabia’s most coveted. The works with the greatest historical appeal are the early groundbreaking ones from his highly inventive Dada period (circa 1914–22), in which mechanical forms dominate. In 1990, for instance, the Paris auctioneer Guy Loudmer sold Picabia’s La petite Udnie, 1913–1914, for F24 million ($4.1 million) as part of the Bourdon family auction. (Yes, this was the same hugely successful sale that led to Loudmer’s receiving a prison sentence for misappropriation of funds.) A Cubist-inspired portrait of a woman as a machine—somewhere between Duchamp’s celebrated Nude Descending a Staircase, 1912, and Léger’s later paintings, but slightly more organic in form—La petite Udnie remains the artist’s all-time auction record holder.