18 Facts About Francis Picabia

Francis Picabia was a French avant-garde painter, poet and typographist.

Francis Picabia was one of the early major figures of the Dada movement in the United States and in France.

Francis Picabia was later briefly associated with Surrealism, but would soon turn his back on the art establishment.

Francis Picabia was born in Paris of a French mother and a Cuban father of Spanish descent.

Francis Picabia's birth year of 1879 coincided with the Spanish-Cuban Little War; and though Picabia was born in Paris, his father was involved in Cuban-French relations and would later serve as attache at the Cuban legation in Paris.

Francis Picabia's mother died of tuberculosis when he was seven and her mother died soon after.

Francis Picabia studied under Fernand Cormon, Ferdinand Humbert, and Albert Charles Wallet for two years.

Early in his career, from 1903 to 1908, Francis Picabia was influenced by the Impressionist paintings of Alfred Sisley.

Around 1911 Francis Picabia joined the Puteaux Group, whose members he had met at the studio of Jacques Villon in Puteaux, a commune in the western suburbs of Paris.

From 1913 to 1915 Francis Picabia traveled to New York City several times and took an active part in the avant-garde movements, introducing Modern art to America.

Francis Picabia continued the periodical with the help of Marcel Duchamp in the United States.

Francis Picabia continued his involvement in the Dada movement through 1919 in Zurich and Paris, before breaking away from it after developing an interest in Surrealist art.

Francis Picabia drew on religious imagery, erotic iconography, and the iconography of games of chance.

In 1925, Francis Picabia returned to figurative painting, and during the 1930s became a close friend of the modernist novelist Gertrude Stein.

Some went to an Algerian merchant who sold them, and so it passed that Francis Picabia came to decorate brothels across North Africa under the Occupation.

Francis Picabia died in Paris in 1953 and was interred in the Cimetiere de Montmartre.

Public collections holding works by Picabia include the Museum of Modern Art and Solomon R Guggenheim Museum in New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Tate Gallery, London and the Musee National d'Art Moderne, Paris.

In 2003, a Francis Picabia painting once owned by Andre Breton sold for US$1.6million.