Francis Picabia in the 1940s: beauty as insurrection

To speak of Francis Picabia is to invoke the great chameleon of the avant-garde, an artist who made contradiction his only homeland. Francis Picabia was a cubist, the driving force of Dadaism in New York and a convinced surrealist, but none of his phases has generated as much discomfort, debate and, finally, fascination as his production during the 1940s. As Europe crumbled under the weight of World War II, Francis Picabia deliberately abandoned abstraction and intellectual experimentalism to embrace an aesthetic that many labeled “vulgar”: female portraiture inspired by the eroticism of mass-market magazines and the iconography of cinema. Picabia