31 Facts About Francis Picabia

When considering the many styles that Picabia painted in, observers have described his career as "shape-shifting" or "kaleidoscopic".

Francis Picabia was one of the early major figures of the Dada movement in the United States and in France before denouncing it in 1921.

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.

The family was affluent, and both parents encouraged Francis Picabia to pursue an art career.

Francis Picabia's mother died of tuberculosis when he was five, and he was raised by his father.

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

Francis Picabia began buying at least one new sports car each year, and ultimately owned 127 over the course of his life.

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

Francis Picabia soon came to feel he was working in an outdated style and began to look for a new approach.

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.

The wealthy Francis Picabia was the only member of the Cubist group to personally attend the Armory Show, as the others could not afford to do so, and he contributed four paintings.

The American press was largely hostile to the show, describing it as bizarre or deviant, but Francis Picabia was widely interviewed and discussed as the only representative of the movement available.

Francis Picabia immediately became a major name in New York's artistic circles.

From 1913 to 1915 Francis Picabia traveled to New York City several times.

Francis Picabia did not return to France until the war's conclusion.

Francis Picabia was first impressed by mechanical advances on his initial, 1913 visit to New York, and on returning to Europe, he was impressed by futurist painters such as Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov.

Francis Picabia was particularly influenced by the "machine style" of Marcel Duchamp, in which the artist used materials such as metal and glass as well as mechanical drawing implements.

In 1915, Francis Picabia began to create and exhibit his own drawings and prints of mysterious machines and apparatuses to reflect the coming of the Machine Age.

Francis Picabia continued in this style for almost a decade, exhibiting a large solo show of his machinist work in 1922.

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, producing a series of dense, garish paintings known as his "Monster" period.

From 1927 to 1930, Francis Picabia produced his "Transparencies" series, paintings that combined images from High Renaissance art with figures from contemporary popular culture.

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.

Francis Picabia was married in 1909 to Gabriele Buffet-Picabia, a French art critic and writer affiliated with Dadaism and later an organizer of the French resistance.

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.