ABSTRACT ART HISTORY Page: 14
Picabia
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Picabia is even more disconcerting, for if Kupka went too far by trying to give everything at once, the Spanish painter has offered us a surfeit of both the worst and the best. In 1912 or 1913 he could be counted among the four or five best painters of his time, after which he blundered into every passing fashion so that the art to which he had contributed some undeniable masterpieces might easily have been misjudged as a phase in his careerism. His outstanding canvases were Procession in Seville,Udnie, Edtaonisl,Remembrance of my beloved Udnie, New York,The Spring,Dances by the Spring, Star Dancer and her School, all painted in 1912 or 1913. Picabia cannot be blamed, for after all no man can give more or other than what there is in him to give. It is no secret that he enjoyed the frills and smalltalk of social life, but that does not mean that he was not capable of brilliant demonstrations of wit in his painting. His machine-portraits are certainly examples of this, as well as his compositions with anti-aesthetic objects such as combs, sardine-tins and matches, which are in the best Dadaist spirit. His later productions however were not so successful. At Cannes, where he delighted in organizing the festivals, he returned to figurative painting for a number of years, much of it of a disappointing level. It was only in 1945 that Picabia was moved, like many others, by the postliberation revival and began to paint in the spirit of the age. His natural reaction was to return to abstract art, while still continuing to run it down, producing a series of very personal canvases which were somewhat aggressive in colour and in every case full of surprises in their composition (First seek your Orpheus,Awareness of Misery,Black Eye,The Third Sex, all of which belong to 1948). Then in 1949 he made a series of pictures consisting of nothing but dots, which are surely among the oddest works that have been produced in abstract art. I admit that I greatly enjoyed them when they were being painted, and was responsible for encouraging Picabia to produce so many of them.
While Delaunay, Kupka, Picabia, Mondrian and others made Paris the capital of abstract art, Kandinsky was working on his own in Munich. Despite his efforts to attract, round his Blue Horseman, all the best talents he knew of in the world of art, the fact remains that his own were the only genuinely abstract works in the exhibitions of the famous group in the course of 1912.
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