Francis Picabia - Buy or sell works
22 January 1879, Paris (France) – 30 November 1953, Paris (France)
Francis Picabia was an important Spanish-French painter, graphic artist, author and poet. Over the course of his life, he pursued multiple artistic styles including Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism and Dadaism.
Francis Martínez Picabia was born in Paris in 1879 as the son of Francisco Martínez Picabia, a Cuban-born Spaniard of aristocratic lineage and the wealthy bourgeois Frenchwoman Cécile Davanne. His artistic training began in 1895 at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, where he was taught by the painters Fernand Humbert and Albert Chris Wallet, among others. Later, as an apprentice in the studio of Fernand Cormon, Picabia began Impressionist painting and exhibited several of his works, for instance at the Salon d’Automne and Galerie Haussmann.
Inspired by his encounter with the French artist Gabrielle Buffett, Picabia gravitated towards Fauvism in 1908 and began to create works with accentuated contours, contrasting colours and reduced shapes. In 1911, he was strongly influenced by Cubism and joined the Puteaux group. In 1913, he took part in the renowned Armory Show.
With the outbreak of the First World War, Picabia devoted himself to Dadaism and began to work as a writer: He published poems as well as the magazine “391”.
Today, the diverse works of Picabia can be visited, among other places, in the MoMA in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.