Francis Picabia's Anti-Art Anti-Christ
Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère: Francis Picabia’s Anti-Art Anti-Christ Sarah Hayden Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère was published in Paris in the autumn of 1920.1 After protracted, ultimately abortive, negotiations with René Hilsum and Bernard Grasset, it was produced at Francis Picabia’s own expense under the ‘Collection Dada’ imprint of Paris bookseller-publishers, Au Sans Pareil, and distributed by Jacques Povlovsky’s Librairie-Galerie La Cible.2 The fact that Ezra Pound was an early proponent of Picabia’s writing is not surprising; the fact that his enthusiastic early reading of Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère has not been succeeded by extensive further scholarship certainly is. Having dismissed Picabia in 1916 as a proponent of ‘modern froth’,3 by 1921 Pound was willing to praise his prowess ‘not exactly as a painter, but as a writer’.4 In the same year, Pound 1. Francis Picabia, Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère (Paris: Au Sans Pareil, 1920), hereafter JCR in the text. Translators and critics have offered various glosses on the book’s title. See Michel Sanouillet, Francis Picabia et 391, vol. 2 (Paris: Eric Losfeld, 1966), p. 123, and Francis Picabia, I am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose and Provocation, ed. and trans. by Marc Lowenthal (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2007), p. 223. Picabia also used the ‘rasta’ prefix in his visual art of this period, including Tableau rastadada (1920) (collage on paper, 19 x 17 cm), and Le Rastaquouère (1920). The latter of these was exhibited at the Salon d’automne, Paris, October 1920. For an illuminating treatment of the Tableau rastadada, see George Baker, ‘Long live Daddy’, October, 105 (2003), 37–72.
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