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ANNE UMLAND is The Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Curator of Painting and A “kaleidoscopic series of art experiences.” That is how Marcel Duchamp Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, where she most recently described the career of his lifelong friend Francis Picabia (1879–1953), co-organized the exhibition Picasso Sculpture (2015–16) and organized whose mind-bendingly diverse production over the course of fifty years René Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary (2013–14). ranged from Impressionist painting to radical abstraction, from Dadaist provocation to pseudo-classicism, and from photo-based realism to Art Informel. CATHÉRINE HUG is Curator, Kunsthaus Zürich, where she most recently Intrepid and audacious, restless and brilliant, Picabia would achieve fame— co-organized the exhibitions Dadaglobe Reconstructed (2016), Europe. and no small degree of infamy—for his position at the forefront of Dada, The Future of History (2015), and Expressionism in Germany and France (2014). only to break publicly with the movement in 1921. Abandoning Paris in 1925 for a life on the French Riviera, where he would remain until after World War II, FRANCIS PICABIA: OUR HEADS ARE ROUND SO OUR THOUGHTS CAN CHANGE DIRECTION the artist continued to pursue an expansive art/life practice that included also includes essays by George Baker, Carole Boulbès, Masha Chlenova, painting, writing, yachting, gambling, organizing lavish parties, and racing Michèle C. Cone, Briony Fer, Gordon Hughes, David Joselit, Jean-Jacques fast cars. Always seemingly one step ahead of his critics and his peers, Lebel, Bernard Marcadé, Arnauld Pierre, Juri Steiner, Adrian Sudhalter, this inveterate shape-shifter who perpetually questioned the purpose and and Aurélie Verdier; an illustrated chronology by Rachel Silveri; and an meaning of art would prove profoundly inspirational for many younger artists, annotated checklist by Natalie Dupêcher with Talia Kwartler.
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