Picabia and Friends, Céret

with Ellen Turner Hall

Francis Picabia, painter, innovator,  satirist, philosopher,  chameleon!  The many facets of this multi-talented and ever-restless artist are on display at Céret museum’s latest exhibition.  Alongside Picabia’s eclectic production, works by his fellow-artists bring to life the artistic experimentation of the period between 1913 and 1924.

Seeking a new language in  response to the horror of the First  World  War, Picabia exiled himself from war-torn  France and  became the  charismatic centre of a group of artists first in New York City and then in Barcelona.

The extreme modernity he found in Manhattan inspired Picabia  to write in 1913, “New York is the cubist city, the futurist city. It expresses modern thought in its architecture, its life, its spirit.”  There he  created a  series of   “machine portraits”  where mechanical objects  replace  human forms, abandoning figurative art  in favour of  clean lines and abstract composition as in Embarras.

In Barcelona  Picabia shifted his attention to the creation of an avant-garde review called 391, a manifesto for anti-painting.  His illustration for Roulette  looks like it escaped from a mechanical drawing manual. Other contributors included Jean Arp, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp.

As the group discovered Catalan  customs and traditions, they integrated into their work  twirling dancers, elaborate costumes and  decorative fans. These are represented in the paintings of Albert Gleizes, Marie Laurencin, Sonia Delauney and Natalia Gontcharova.  Seated women wearing elegant  mantillas,  are the subjects of  two contrasting portraits : Picabia’s  dark, sober Espagnole and Picasso’s  light-infused pointillist Woman with  Mantilla.  

You can also see a short  Dada-inspired film written by Picabia with music by Erik Satie. One absurd image follows another: deflating balloon heads, a dancer’s feet seen from below,  a runaway hearse, a magician who makes the whole scene, including himself, disappear.

In the course of his career Picabia’s attention shifted  from Cubism to Dadaism to Surrealism.   At the end  of his life  his canvases were reduced  to a series of dots, the  ultimate abstraction.

Picabia, Méditerranée  Picasso, Delauney, Laurencin… runs from 27 June to 29 November 2026. Open from 10h00 to 18h00. For details see: musee-ceret.com