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American University Thesis and Dissertation Template for PC 2016 © COPYRIGHT by Paul Blakeslee 2019 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED CHERCHEZ LA FEMME: REASSESSING FRANCIS PICABIA’S WORLD WAR II NUDES BY Paul Blakeslee ABSTRACT This thesis closely examines two of Francis Picabia’s oil paintings from World War II, Femme à la Sculpture Grecque Noire et Blanche (Woman with Black and White Greek Sculpture, c. 1942-43) and Femme à l’Idole (Woman With Idol, c.1941-43). It argues that Picabia employed a range of art historical allusions in each work to critique the French Surrealists’ claims about their own art-making. Aligning himself with an older tradition of modernist avant- gardism, Picabia returned to a Dadaistic mode of artistic deconstruction to wage an attack on André Breton’s theories of Surrealist art. Picabia’s critique of Surrealism encompassed the movement’s political affiliations, its fascination with the erotic female body, and its primitivizing interactions with the art of indigenous cultures. Comparing his own oeuvre to the artistic practices of Édouard Manet and Paul Gauguin, Picabia derided the Surrealist practice as a corruption of the avant-gardism represented by those artists. This understudied portion of Picabia’s oeuvre has previously been seen within the context of the artist’s personal behavior during the Vichy regime in France; however, this argument looks instead to art-historical politics, drawing links between Picabia’s early career as a Dadaist and his enigmatic later practice. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Dr. Juliet Bellow, for her extensive efforts in getting this thesis off the ground and guiding it safely home; Dr. Jordan Amirkhani, for her insightful and gracious assistance with a minefield of difficult material; my partner, Noelani Kirschner, for her editorial and existential guidance, as well her infinite patience and good humor throughout the thesis process; the AU art history faculty; the members of my cohort; Carla Galfano and the staff of the AU Museum; Francis Picabia, whose ability to hold a grudge made this thesis possible; and especially my family, for all their love, support, and encouragement. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT....................................................................................................................................ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS..............................................................................................................iii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS...........................................................................................................v INTRODUCTION………………….....…………………………………………………..1 CHAPTER 1: FEMME À LA SCULPTURE GREQUE NOIRE ET BLANCHE…............17 CHAPTER 2: FEMME À L’IDOLE…………………......................................................34 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………….…….49 ILLUSTRATIONS........................................................................................................................52 BIBLIOGRAPHY..........................................................................................................................54 iv LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Illustration Figure 1: Francis Picabia, Femme à la Sculpture Grecque Noire et Blanche, c. 1942-43…....…52 Figure 2: Francis Picabia, Femme à l’Idole, c.1941-43………………………………………….52 Figure 3: Francis Picabia, La Jeune Fille Américaine dans L’état de Nudité, 1915…….………52 Figure 4: Francis Picabia, Fille Née Sans Mère, 1915.…….……………………..……...……...52 Figure 5: Suzanne Duchamp, Un et Une Menacé, 1916……………………….……………..…52 Figure 6: Francis Picabia, Voilà Haviland, 1915………………………………………………..52 Figure 7: Man Ray, La Prière, 1930…………………………………………………………….52 . Figure 8: Brassaï, Nude, 1931-34………………………………………………………………..52 Figure 9: Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863………….….………………….……………………..52 Figure 10: Édouard Manet, Dejéuner sur l’Herbe, 1863.…………. ……………...……….……52 Figure 11: Titian, Venus d’Urbino, 1538…..………………………………………………....….52 Figure 12: Raphael and Marcantonio Raimondi, Judgement of Paris, c. 1510-20........................52 Figure 13: Man Ray, Mannequin, 1938.………………..………………………………………..52 Figure 14: Raoul Ubac, Mannequin, 1938……………………………………………………….52 Figure 15: Man Ray, Noire et Blanche, 1926………………...………………………………….52 Figure 16: Fernand Legér, Le Grande Dejéuner (Three Women), 1921-22………..………....…52 Figure 17: Mon Paris cover, 1937……………………………………………………………….52 Figure 18: Paul Gauguin, Rave te Hiti Aamu (The Idol), 1898.………………………………….52 Figure 19: Paul Gauguin, The Great Buddha, 1899………………………………………….….52 Figure 20: Paul Gauguin, Tahitian Idol – The Goddess Hina, 1894-95………………...……….52 Figure 21: Paul Gauguin, Idole à la Coquille, 1892-93………………………………………….52 Figure 22: Paul Gauguin, The Spirit of the Dead Watching (Manao Tupapau),1892…….……..53 v Figure 23: Venus of Willendorf, c. 28,000-25,000 BCE…………….…………………………...53 Figure 24: Paul Mathias Padua, Schlafende Diana, c. 1943…………….…………………….…53 vi INTRODUCTION Francis Picabia has come under scrutiny for many aspects of his art and his life—most especially for images that objectify, sexualize, or imaginatively violate the female body.1 His paintings made during World War II, which depict sensuously nude women in ambiguous narrative settings, have received particular opprobrium in this regard. Not only are these works almost universally judged to be kitschy; some critics also have read them as visual evidence of Picabia’s anti-Semitism, perhaps made to pander to the artistic tastes of the Nazi forces then occupying Vichy France.2 In recent years, however, art historians have begun to reassess these works. Scholars have determined that many of the nude figures that populate these canvases are directly transposed from mass-produced soft-core pornography.3 Rather than offering a cohesive reading of the paintings, though, this determination seems to further muddy the waters. What are we to make of these works? Why did Picabia spend World War II making a body of work that barely resembles the rest of his oeuvre? Why did he begin to paint figures directly from pornography? Can we reconcile these works with the avant-gardism of the time, or with Picabia’s earlier artistic and political commitments? This thesis addresses such questions by closely reading two of Picabia’s paintings from this period: Femme à la Sculpture Grecque Noire et Blanche (Woman with Black and White 1 See, for example, Janine Mileaf and Matthew Witkovsky, “Paris,” in Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris, ed. Leah Dickerman and Brigid Doherty (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2005): 359-360. 2 Yve-Alain Bois has been vociferous in advancing this view of Picabia’s World War II paintings. See Bois, “Picabia, de Dada à Pétain.” Macula 1 (1976), 122-123, reprinted in “Francis Picabia: From Dada to Pétain,” trans. Thomas Repensek, October 30 (Autumn 1984): 127; and Bois, Picabia (Paris: Flammarion, 1975). 3 Sara Cochran, “Francis Picabia’s Painting During the Second World War and His Use of Photography,” in Picabia: The Late Works, 1933-1953, ed. Zdenek Felix (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje, 1998), 17-22. 1 Greek Sculpture, c. 1942-43; fig. 1) and Femme à l’Idole (Woman with Idol, c.1941-43; fig. 2). In these two paintings, the central female figure—each one appropriated from a pornographic photograph—interacts with an awkwardly-rendered sculptural figure in a decontextualized interior setting. In Femme à la Sculpture Grecque, the titular Greek sculpture, which resembles a battered, weather-beaten mannequin, mirrors the features of the nude woman looking at her. In Femme à l’Idole, a lingerie-clad woman climbs into the arms of a life-sized, exoticized wooden “idol.” Like the other works in this series, these paintings occupy an uneasy middle ground between naturalistic representation and subtly distorted expressionism. The perspectives applied to each element of the paintings fail to cohere into an illusionistic plane of representation, and the flat coloration of the washy brushstrokes stand out on the canvas. Rather than dismiss these works for their apparent bad taste, or their possible associations with Nazi aesthetics, as specialists have generally done, I will argue that they launched a complex critique against the French Surrealist movement. In these paintings, Picabia resumed the battle he waged during the early 1920s with the movement’s figurehead, André Breton. In 1921, Picabia publicly denounced Breton’s tight control over the Paris Dada collective, leaving the group and initiating a long-lasting feud. During the 1930s, Breton and his circle increasingly linked Surrealism with orthodox Communist politics. 4 For Picabia, this turn to institutional politics encapsulated Breton’s original betrayal of Dadaism in 1921; he saw participation in 4 For a detailed history of Surrealism’s entanglement with revolutionary politics, see Helena Lewis, The Politics of Surrealism (New York: Paragon House, 1988). Benjamin Buchloh, investigating this crossover between avant-garde artmaking and the political turmoil of the 1930s, has argued that 1930s artists essentially ceded their ability to envision a society that responded to artistic innovation and instead simply rehashed trite classicizing themes that paved the way for fascists to prey on populations nostalgic for an imagined glorious past. His argument implies that there simply was not an avant-garde to speak of in the 1930s in the same sense that existed before World War I. Instead, European artmaking lost its way in the confusion of the times. See Benjamin Buchloh, “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of Representation
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