He was born in Paris in 1879 to a French mother and Cuban father. After painting in an Impressionist style in his younger days, he made an influential series of Cubist works, became a key figure in the revolutionary Dada movement, then moved on to the Surrealists, and kept innovating (with some “girlie”-magazine-illustration-style paintings during World War II, like Women With Bulldog, below) and pushing himself until his death in 1953. Though Picabia never became a household name, he was one of the most important provocateurs of 20th-century art. And at long last his work and life have been given a major retrospective in the U.S. “Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round so Our Thoughts Can Change Direction,” was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from November 21 through March 19, 2017, offering more than 200 works of art of various media, including 125 paintings. Here is PROVOKR’s portfolio of some of the titillating treasures on view.
