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Paul Blakeslee

2019

CHERCHEZ LA FEMME: REASSESSING FRANCIS PICABIA’S

WORLD WAR II NUDES

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.

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.

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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

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

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.

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 in European Painting,” October 16 (Spring 1981): 39-68.

politics as antithetical to avant-garde societal critique. Returning to the productive nihilism of what he termed the “Dada spirit,” Picabia derided the Surrealists’ belief in the revolutionary potential of their art—in particular, their belief that by harnessing the power of the unconscious mind, they could spur a broader societal transformation.

The “Dada spirit” as a critical stance animates Femme à la Sculpture Grecque and

Femme à l’Idole, which deconstruct the Surrealists’ claims to a liberated, enlightened sexuality and their connection to a “primitive” consciousness. To substantiate this argument, I will first establish that strategies of appropriation and allusion—strategies characteristic of his earlier paintings—are central to these works. Not only did Picabia transpose the central figure in each painting from preexisting pornographic images, but elements in both compositions also reference the avant-garde painting practices of Édouard Manet and Paul Gauguin. Through this juxtaposition, Picabia interrogated what he saw as the fatal flaws of the Surrealists’ artistic philosophy.5 These paintings function intertextually, forming a network of visual allusions that establish Picabia’s own lineage within the history of French avant-gardism while simultaneously denigrating the Surrealists’ status as inheritors of the avant-garde tradition. In other words, in these paintings Picabia staked a claim for his Dada principles within the canon of modernist art history, even as he attacked that canon from within.

5 Francis Picabia, “M. Picabia se Sépare des Dadas,” Comoedia (May 11, 1921), translated and reprinted as Picabia, “Mr. Picabia Breaks with the Dadas,” trans. Matthew Witkovsky, October 105 (Summer 2003): 145-146.

Picabia and the “Dada spirit”: An Ongoing History

The visual dissimilarities between Picabia’s mechanomorphic works and his World War

II nudes obscures the conceptual continuity that unites them.6 We therefore must clarify how this later manifestation of the “Dada spirit” relates to its origins in Picabia’s work of the 1910s and

20s.7 That time period is typified by the mechanomorphic works—which used depictions of machine assemblages to signify human sexual characteristics—that secured Picabia’s reputation in New York, such as La Jeune Fille Américaine dans L’état de Nudité (Young American Woman in a State of Nudity, 1915; fig. 3). These works share thematic concerns with the work of other artists with whom Picabia affiliated, allowing scholars to contextualize his output within the avant-garde artistic community. 8 Compare, for example, Picabia’s Fille Née Sans Mère (Girl

Born Without a Mother, 1915; fig. 4) with Suzanne Duchamp’s Un et Une Menacé (He and She

Threatened, 1916; fig. 5). These works, which play with the resonances between machine parts and human sexuality, offer scholars a grounding to explore illogic, biting humor, embrace of

“low” culture as oppositional to “high” art, and full-throated deconstruction that form the core of the anti-art stance, which coalesced under Dada.

6 For one notable exception to this trend of isolating Picabia’s early practice for study, see Gabrielle Gopinath, “Trash and Glamour on the Riviera: Francis Picabia’s Midi (Promenade des Anglais),” Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin (2003): 104-109. Gopinath argues that a painting from 1926, Midi (Promenade des Anglais), created shortly after Picabia’s move to Cannes, should be read as essentially continuous with Picabia’s Dada oeuvre in its critical aims. Even this article, though, focuses on the very earliest portion of Picabia’s late career.

7 To cite just two examples of the rich scholarship about this period, see Barbara Zabel, “The Constructed Self: Gender and Portraiture in Machine-Age America,” in Women in Dada: Essays on Sex, Gender, and Identity, ed. Naomi Sawelson-Gorse (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1998), 22-47; and David Hopkins, “Questioning Dada’s Potency: Picabia’s La Sainte Vierge and the Dialogue with Duchamp,” Art History 15, no. 3 (September 1992): 317-333.

8 Amelia Jones, Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004).

Even after distancing himself from his peers and finding new visual idioms, Picabia continued to take this stance—the “Dada spirit”—as the crux of his practice. In particular,

Picabia saw borrowing, quotation, and appropriation as central to the “Dada spirit,” cutting against retrograde notions of artistic originality and genius. His mechanomorphic works replicated and distorted engineering diagrams, technical manuals, and product catalogs, often in ways that precluded their utility as machines.9 For example, Voilà Haviland (1915; fig. 6) replicates an image of a lamp from a magazine advertisement. However, Picabia omitted the lamp’s plug, negating the object’s purpose and offering in its place a humorous futility.

Responding to criticism of his mechanomorphic appropriations, Picabia remarked: “So Picabia invented nothing: he copies! I’m afraid so, he copies an engineer’s working drawing instead of copying apples! Copying apples, anyone can understand that; copying a turbine: that’s stupid.”10

Picabia employed a similar appropriation of low-cultural visual material in the World

War II nudes, even as the sources of this material changed. In appropriating figures from pornographic photographs, Picabia selected certain figures from the range of available models because of his fascination with “photographs in which the proportions of the model’s body are distorted due to a sharp camera angle,” suggesting an overlap of mechanistic processes and the female body derived from his earlier mechanomorphic practice.11 As in his earlier works,

9 William Camfield, “The Machinist Style of Francis Picabia,” The Art Bulletin 48, no. 3/4 (Sep. – Dec. 1966): 314-315.

10 Francis Picabia, “L’Oeil Cacodylate,” Comoedia (November 23, 1921): 2. Reprinted in Francis Picabia, I Am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose, and Provocation, trans. Marc Lowenthal (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2007): 277-278. 11 Cochran, “Francis Picabia’s Painting,” 27.

moreover, female sexuality is inextricably entangled with machines and mechanistic processes.12

The mechanomorphic paintings of the World War I period manifest machines warped by the biological, an entanglement of appropriations and re-workings of technical diagrams with punning hints of human sex organs and sexual acts. In the World War II corpus, the human female form is not wholly replaced by machine images, but is nevertheless reshaped by mechanically-produced distortions of the camera lens.

While it is now recognized that Picabia paintings of the 1940s were appropriated from pornographic magazines, scholars have not yet noticed that he also began to quote and adapt aspects of Manet’s and Gauguin’s paintings in these same works. He thereby highlighted the continuities he saw between his practice and that of earlier avant-gardists—in essence, constructing a history of avant-garde practice that linked Dada with canonical figures of the late nineteenth century. In Femme à la Sculpture Grecque and Femme à l’Idole, Picabia mobilized an avant-garde tradition of self-critical referentiality to simultaneously champion the “Dada spirit” and denigrate Surrealist practice. This move placed him in the lineage of avant-gardists like

Manet and Gauguin while impugning the Surrealists’ claim to inheritance from that tradition.

Surrealism and the dissolution of Paris Dada

In order to understand why and how Picabia returned to his dispute with Breton and the

Surrealists during the 1930s, we must first establish Breton’s idea of Surrealism and his clashes with Picabia in the 1920s. Picabia’s Dadaistic repurposing of artistic content—central to a notion of avant-gardism as a process of artistic critique—deflates the notion of the artist-as-genius and

12 This overlap has been most well-studied in regard to Picabia’s New York work during World War I; see for example David Hopkins, “Questioning Dada’s Potency: Picabia’s La Sainte Vierge and the Dialogue with Duchamp” Art History 15, no. 3 (September 1992), 317-333.

its corollary emphasis on originality, which was central to Breton’s philosophy of Surrealist artmaking. Breton’s Surrealist movement prized subjectivity and the interior life of the mind, which positioned art-making as entirely dependent upon originality and creative genius. The Surrealists adopted Freud’s psychoanalytic explorations of the unconscious mind as the scientific foundation for Surrealist art-making.13 These artists sought ways to bypass the restrictive influence of the conscious mind and accessing the unconscious directly. In so doing, they aimed to create an unmediated art of the mind’s interior that would transform the rational world of modernism in which the Surrealists existed. Breton himself defined the boundaries of Surrealist art in various essays and manifestos, binding the movement’s goals to his own artistic worldview.

Picabia’s World War II nudes highlight the extent to which Surrealism’s aesthetics were associated with misogyny and violence against the female body.14 While Picabia was notably misogynistic in his own work, his appropriation of figures from pornography skewered the

Surrealist conflation of sex with art, inviting the viewer to compare Surrealist works with low- culture erotic photography. He thereby attacked the sexualization that formed a key pillar of

Surrealism’s revolutionary potential, as imagined by its practitioners. In his “Manifesto of

Surrealism,” Breton repeatedly conflated the term “ideas” with “women,” suggesting that artmaking is intrinsically masculine, heteronormative, and sexualized.15 Images of women—often

13 André Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism,” in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. and ed. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1969), 22-23.

14 Rudolf E. Kuenzli, “Surrealism and Misogyny,” in Surrealism and Women, ed. Mary Ann Caws, Rudolf E. Kuenzli, and Gwen Raaberg (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991): 17-26.

15 André Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism,” in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. and ed. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1969), 13.

in various states of nudity and under the specular control of the male artist—became vectors by which Surrealists asserted themselves as revolutionary artistic geniuses. For example, Man Ray’s

La Prière (The Prayer, 1930; fig. 7) shows a woman hunched on her knees, bent over with her hand reaching back to cover her genitalia from view. Her head and shoulders, disappearing into shadow, are cut off by the right edge of the image, leaving only a quasi-abstract composition activated by the defamiliarized forms of her buttocks, hands, and feet. Ray’s work collapses the distinction between woman as inspiration and woman as subject matter, using the female body itself as an enactment of Surrealist ideals.16 The Surrealist sexualization of women depended on an element of control, on harnessing the female form as a vector to explore the defamiliarization of reality through abstraction and “optical assaults on the body.”17 Brassaï’s Nude (1931-1934; fig. 8) exemplifies this trend: the photograph, which pictures a woman’s torso, arm, and buttocks as she turns away from the camera, isolates and crops the woman’s body, completely eliding any identifying features, to suggest the shape of a phallus, visually imposing patriarchal control onto the body of his model. This dynamic—a woman’s body is used as the strangely impersonal medium by which a male artist manifests his subjective psychic vision—comprised an intrinsic feature of Breton’s Surrealism.

For Picabia, the Surrealists’ tightly exercised artistic control over women’s bodies ran counter to the freewheeling anarchism of the “Dada spirit”; his conception of avant-gardism

16 The uncomfortable overtones of violence inherent in the image as well—the submissive passivity of the woman’s pose and the sharp visual segmentation of her body—characterize Surrealist art in this period. See Mary Ann Caws, “Ladies Shot and Painted: Female Embodiment in Surrealist Art,” in The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History, ed. Norma Broude and Mary Gerard (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992): 381-395.

17 Rosalind Krauss, “Corpus Delicti,” October 33 (September 1985): 43.

prized iconoclasm and a refusal of any kind of authority. He saw such control mirrored in

Breton’s attitude toward the Surrealist group itself, as well as Breton’s political program for the group. Breton famously demanded complete adherence to his vision of the movement’s direction and aims; as such, the history of Surrealism is characterized by internecine strife and acrimonious excommunications of members.18 The “Manifesto of Surrealism” not only set out the artistic and psychic goals of the movement, but also enumerated the artists Breton perceived as adhering to its mission. More importantly, it explicitly excluded artists of whom Breton disapproved—including Picabia. Breton called these artists “instruments too full of pride,” explaining that “this is why they have not always produced a harmonious sound.”19 For Breton,

Picabia’s inability to mesh with the group strictures governing the Surrealist movement precluded his art from being considered worthy of inclusion. Breton went even further in his

1936 essay “Surrealism and Painting,” characterizing Picabia as a “gamecock” and declaring his

“total incomprehension of Surrealism.”20

The differences between Picabia and Breton over the nature of avant-garde practice culminated in a Dada event staged on May 13, 1921: a show trial of Maurice Barrès, the

Symbolist author and politician who had become a nationalist icon in France following World

War I. The mock trial built on the wildly successful public performances that the Dadaists had

18 Michel and Anne Sanouillet, Dada in Paris, revised ed., trans. Sharmila Ganguly (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009).

19 Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism,” 27. Picabia, in being included in this list, found himself in the company of artists such as Picasso, de Chirico, and Duchamp.

20 André Breton, “Surrealism and Painting,” in Surrealism and Painting, trans. and ed. Simon Watson Taylor (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 18. The term “gamecock” here likely has derogatory overtones that allude to Picabia’s Spanish ancestry.

staged over the previous year, which had caught the attention of the Parisian public with their disruptive, confrontational tactics.21 The Barrès trial, by contrast, was “a mostly solemn affair” that “did not traffic in the wild irreverence that Parisians had come to expect from Dada events.”22 Breton envisioned the event as a means by which Dadaists would interrogate and deliver justice to a reactionary who had once been seen as a revolutionary avant-garde voice.

This strategy would establish Dada’s legacy within the literary avant-garde, placing it in public opposition to the nationalism that previously avant-garde figures like Barrès had come to espouse. However, established Dadaists such as Picabia and Tristan Tzara opposed Breton, Louis

Aragon, and the other members of the poet’s circle, seeing the trial as misaligned with the aims of Dada’s mode of social critique.23 The trial thus exacerbated the growing interpersonal rifts within the Dada movement, effectively dissolving it. While many of the artists and writers involved with the Barrès trial went on to become members of Breton’s Surrealist movement,

21 These freewheeling performances followed the example of the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich: writers would read tracts and confrontational manifestos designed to confound the audience, often deploying costumes and props, disrupting performances with loud electric bells, and, on at least one occasion, parading Picabia’s paintings through the venue in the middle of the action. Most importantly, the audience often revolted during the performances, with spectacular unruliness becoming a key part of the draw for these events. Witkovsky, “Dada Breton,” 131-132. See also Breton’s account of the Dada performances in “Les ‘Enfers Artificiels:’ Ouverture de la ‘Saison Dada 1921,’” in Oeuvres Complètes (vol. 1), ed. Marguerite Bonnet (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 623-630; translated and reprinted as Breton, “Artificial Hells. Inauguration of the ‘1921 Dada Season,’” trans. Michael Witkovsky, October 105 (Summer 2003), 137-144.

22 Harding, The Ghosts of the Avant-Garde(s), 35.

23 James S. Harding, The Ghosts of the Avant-Garde(s): Exorcising Experimental Theater and Performance (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 35.

those who had objected—including Picabia, who stormed out of the hall in the middle of the proceedings—found themselves relatively marginalized. 24

Following the calamitous Barrès trial, Picabia disavowed the Paris Dada movement in a statement published in the periodical Comoedia, claiming that “the Dada spirit really only existed between 1913 and 1918, an era during which it never stopped evolving and transforming itself.”25 However, he insisted that, despite Breton’s efforts to extinguish it, “Dada will live forever! And, thanks to that… I will stay Francis Picabia!”26 Even as he claimed to be done with what had become of the Dada movement, he nevertheless broadcast a call to arms for painters still aligned with the confrontational spirit the movement had embodied. He insisted that “one must be a nomad, traveling through ideas as one travels through countries and cities… one must disguise church interiors as ocean liners, and ocean liners as artichokes with cream, make statues come out of the sea and recite verses to passing steamers.”27 This invocation points to the importance of iconoclasm, deconstruction, and artistic individuality that characterized Picabia’s approach to art-making. Whereas Paris Dada under Breton had become hidebound, tied to the very establishments it had previously sought to undermine, Picabia instead advocated for the original “Dada spirit” as he imagined it.

24 Witkovsky, “Dada Breton,” 133-134. For the text of Picabia’s renunciation, see “Mr. Picabia Breaks with the Dadas,” 145-146. A full and exhaustive accounting of Parisian Dada’s dissolution can be found in Michel and Anne Sanouillet, Dada in Paris.

25 Picabia, “Mr. Picabia Breaks with the Dadas,” 145.

26 Picabia, “Mr. Picabia Breaks with the Dadas,” 145.

27 Picabia, “Mr. Picabia Breaks with the Dadas,” 146.

Deciphering Picabia’s late career

Picabia never again fully aligned himself with an artistic movement or group. As the above-cited quotation suggests, his practice became increasingly insular and idiosyncratic. In

1925, he moved to Cannes, in the south of France; he lived on the coast for the subsequent two decades, returning to live in Paris only in the last years of his life. He maintained contact with some of his prior associates, such as Gertrude Stein, but he did not participate in the artistic movements operative in the capital at that time.28 In 1936, he did sign the Dimensionist

Manifesto along with former comrades, such as Marcel Duchamp, Robert and Sonia Delaunay,

Jean (Hans) Arp and Sophie Taeuber. He thus apparently supported the group’s stated aims of moving beyond two-dimensional pictorial representation into a nebulously-defined, fourth- dimensional avant-gardism. Nevertheless, there is little evidence that he seriously took up these aims within his own practice.29

Picabia’s alienation from the avant-garde was exacerbated by his long-standing aversion to political engagement, which deepened his existing antipathy to Breton and the Surrealists.

From the second half of the 1920s until the outbreak of World War II, Breton and his circle

28 Bernard Marcadé, “More Powerful, More Simple, More Human Painting,” in Francis Picabia: Our Heads are Round So Our Thoughts Can Change Direction, ed. Anne Umland and Cathérine Hug (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2016): 206-207.

29 Marcadé, “More Powerful, More Simple, More Human Painting,” 210. There was, however one important exception to this artistic non-affiliation: after World War II, Picabia joined a collective of much younger French artists who called themselves the Surindépendants. Arnauld Pierre writes that this group looked to supersede both surrealism and abstraction, hoping to find a pictorial middle ground between the two that could usher in “an end of the use of Freudian or literary symbolism which is stifling surrealism.” Anonymous article, “Cherchez la Femme,” L’Aurore, Paris 9 October 1946. Quoted in Arnauld Pierre, “Greatness and Decadence in Art: Picabia in the Post-War Period,” in Picabia: The Late Works, 1933- 1953, ed. Zdenek Felix (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje, 1998), 25. The title of the article from which this quote is taken, which translates to “find the woman,” seems especially telling in light of the painting under discussion here.

increasingly saw themselves as political actors. Their artmaking became largely inseparable from their politics, as their revolutionary rhetoric increasingly pushed them toward international

Communist figures, like Leon Trotsky, and emergent strains of fascism.30 During the midst of

World War II, then, having seen that the increasingly orthodox Communism Breton espoused helped spur the conflict, Picabia returned to the subject of Surrealism, linking their artistic and political philosophies to the conflagration tearing Europe apart.

In framing Femme à la Sculpture Grecque and Femme à l’Idole as responses to Surrealist aesthetics and politics, I build upon recent scholarship that has begun to situate Picabia’s late paintings more fully within the overarching concerns of his career. As I note above, scholars recently have positioned the World War II works as a response to the politics of the Vichy regime, and investigated the pornographic source material Picabia appropriated.31 My argument responds especially to Roberto Ohrt’s reading of Picabia’s work as oppositional to the prevailing

30 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 in European Painting,” October 16 (Spring 1981): 39-68.

31 Michèle Cone, Michèle Cone, “Francis Picabia’s ‘War,’” in Francis Picabia: Our Heads are Round So Our Thoughts Can Change Direction, ed. Anne Umland and Cathérine Hug (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2016), 226-230; and Sara Cochran, “Francis Picabia’s Painting”, 17-22, respectively. Bernard Marcadé sees the “superimposed styles” and dramatic stylistic disunity of Picabia’s work from the 1930s as, deceptively, “hampering any effort to understand the paintings as coherent works – or, in sum, as a coherent body of work.” Presented with such apparent chaos, Marcadé argues that the disjunction must be precisely the point, looking to Picabia’s Dada provocations as evidence of this thesis. Marcade, “More Powerful, More Simple, More Human Painting,” 210-211. Similarly, French scholar Arnauld Pierre has analyzed Picabia’s late work—especially the work made between the end of World War 2 and Picabia’s death in 1953—and tried to parse his final descent into abstraction, arguing that Picabia, to some degree, seemed finally to give up on the possibilities of the medium of painting at the end of his life. See Pierre, “Greatness and Decadence,” 23-31.

political forces of fascism sweeping across Europe during the war.32 His assertion is based on

Clement Greenberg’s formulation of kitsch as a political designation that challenges high art; he sees Picabia using kitsch to confront the souring political situation across Europe in the World

War II era. Importantly, Ohrt also points to the intertextuality of Picabia’s approach to painting, contending that his paintings contain “a spectrum of quotes” adding up to “a lexical archive containing visual art throughout the ages and from all regions.”33 This reading helps connect

Picabia’s later career to his more obviously referential works from the 1910s and ‘20s. While I agree with the basic premise of his argument—that Picabia’s use of quotation, allusion, and pointed bad taste has broad political implications—I contend that Picabia’s focus is closer to home, channeled through his objections to the Surrealists. While this focus indirectly addresses the larger political backdrop of the time, Ohrt’s reading elides the particularity of Picabia’s critique in favor a more sweeping, less substantiated claims. For both paintings considered in this thesis, I will begin by formally analyzing the works, using the appropriations and visual allusions found within them to underscore the specifics of Picabia’s critique of Surrealist practice.

The first chapter examines Femme à la Sculpture Grecque Blanche et Noire, painted sometime between 1942 and 1943. To begin, I propose specific elements within the work’s composition—most notably the pose of the central nude figure—as allusions to Manet’s famous avant-garde nudes, especially Olympia (1865, fig. 9). Claiming Manet’s critical stance as his own, Picabia aligns himself with the earlier artist’s oppositional status within the French establishment. In Manet’s time, these paintings attacked the Salon genre of the female nude for

32 Roberto Ohrt, “Avant-Garde Wrinkles and Realistic Artificial Light,” in Picabia: The Late Works, 1933-1953, ed. Zdenek Felix (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje, 1998): 15-16.

33. Ohrt, “Avant-Garde Wrinkles, 12.

its thinly-veiled erotic pretensions. Here, though, Picabia redirects the attack to the Surrealists, linking their similarly disingenuous fascination with the eroticized female body to the retrograde attitudes of the French Salon circa 1860, against which avant-gardists like Manet rebelled.

Further, I argue that Picabia deployed the figure of the “sculpture Grecque” as a critique of

Surrealism’s politics, as well as its reliance on Freudian theory. Equating Surrealist’s revolutionary claims with those of earlier short-lived “return to order” movements from the

1920s, Picabia ridicules the claimed originality of Surrealist vision as derivative and tired. The sculptural figure, which physically resembles the nude woman with which it shares the canvas, enacts the Freudian concept of uncanny doubling, which the Surrealists used extensively in their work. Picabia’s figure attacks that strategy, tying it to the techniques of appropriation for which he himself had been criticized.

The second chapter focuses on Femme à l’Idole. Here, Picabia’s critique expands to include the Surrealist imputation of magical potential to non-European art, positioning the latter as a vehicle for liberation from European societal strictures. Like Femme à la Sculpture Grecque, this painting foregrounds Picabia’s comparison of himself to a canonical avant-garde painter, in this case Paul Gauguin. Picabia quotes Gauguin’s vocabulary of Polynesian idole figures, linking

Gauguin’s foreign excursions in search of artistic truth with his own departure from Paris.

Picabia then creates an opposition to the Surrealists’ Paris-based sampling of exotic cultural artifacts and occulture. Femme à l’Idole questions Surrealists’ contentions of aesthetic revolution as a stylistic performance; whereas Picabia saw himself in Gauguin’s mold, “a nomad, traveling through ideas as one travels through countries and cities,” he instead saw the Surrealists’ Parisian practice as essentially inauthentic and insufficient to their claims of psychic liberation.

Over the course of these two chapters, I propose an avenue of inquiry by which to re- insert Picabia’s World War II corpus into the study of Picabia’s practice. I will not argue that

Picabia’s World War II paintings are without problems of their own, or that they absolve any of

Picabia’s problematic behavior during the war years; any examination of the World War II nudes must of course grapple with the political questions that loom over them. However, I will contend that the operative set of politics to which they respond are those of the French avant-garde art between the World Wars. Because the avant-garde was intrinsically political during that period,

Picabia’s response to them is politically inflected (although only to the extent that Dadaistic nihilism can be classified as a political stance). While Picabia appears to have avoided political affiliation wherever possible, this in itself constitutes a political choice: it is precisely this

“highly criminal indifference” to the political realities of the Nazi era that come under fire.34

34 Bois, “From Dada to Pétain,” 127. 16

CHAPTER 1

FEMME À LA SCULPTURE GREQUE NOIRE ET BLANCHE

Picabia’s Femme à la Sculpture Grecque Noire et Blanche (c. 1942-43; fig. 1) represents two figures, a nude woman appropriated from a pornographic photograph and a confoundingly- rendered figure that can be understood from the title as a sculpture of Greek origin. 35 I will argue that Picabia’s composition alludes to two of Manet’s most famous works, Dejéuner sur l’Herbe

(Luncheon on the Grass, 1863; fig. 10) and Olympia (1865; fig. 9). The pose of the nude female figure in Picabia’s painting loosely resembles that of the central figure in Dejéuner; meanwhile, the curtain that closes off the background recalls a similar motif in Olympia. Picabia also adopted distinctive aspects of Manet’s technique: his use of disjunctive internal lighting, flattened coloration, and a deliberate lack of compositional coherence. By quoting an artist known for appropriating and altering Old Master paintings, Picabia claimed Manet as a precursor for his own practice. This association with a canonical predecessor allowed Picabia to valorize and to legitimize the “Dada spirit” as the nineteenth century avant-garde’s ongoing legacy.

By aligning his appropriation of pornographic photographs with Manet’s tendency to copy other artists’ paintings, Picabia also critiqued the Surrealists’ use of photography. Breton championed photography as a mechanical manifestation of their early experimentation with psychic automatism, the process by which Surrealists sought to make art without the use of conscious thought. Working completely through intuition and free association, they hoped to access the unmediated subjectivity of the mind’s eye. They saw photography as allowing artists to capture chance scenes and spontaneous encounters; often, this defamiliarization added a transformative charge to erotic images of women’s bodies. Picabia deflated this idealistic view of

35 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), 19. 17

both art and sexuality by simply reproducing a banal, clichéd pornographic photograph in his painting. He thereby satirized the Surrealists’ belief in the creative potential of “crazy love.”

My interpretation hinges upon an analysis of the way this appropriated nude relates to painting’s other figure, the “sculpture Grecque.” The sculpture, I argue, equates Surrealist aesthetics and politics to a seemingly antithetical movement: the classicizing “return to order” espoused by the Purists during the 1920s. The resemblance between his sculptural figure and the nude woman beside her allows Picabia to deride the Surrealists’ interest in the Freudian concept of the “uncanny double.” Freud theorized the “uncanny” as a feeling of strange and unsettling familiarity, similar to that which one might encounter in a dream. Repetitions and near repetitions of human forms especially provoked this “uncanny” reaction, as the forms’ multiplicity defamiliarized the viewer’s encounter with each. The Surrealists seized on this strategy in their art, eager to explore the aesthetic possibilities of doubled images, especially in regard to the eroticization of the female form. Picabia’s satirization of uncanny doubling in this painting, though, deflates its revolutionary potential. Instead of a radical work that frees the viewer’s unconscious mind, Picabia offers up an awkwardly-painted mannequin that only somewhat resembles the pornographic figure beside her.

Painting: Manet and the erotic female nude

At first glance, Femme à la Sculpture Grecque appears straightforwardly kitschy—so much so that few scholars have taken its style or its iconography seriously. A nude woman, resting her chin in her hand, sits in front of a dark curtain contemplating a tarnished, cracked nude figure directly in front of her. While the title introduces us to a sculpture, the figure more closely resembles a mannequin or large doll. Even this identification, though, does not quite fully

account for the sketchy, intentionally amateurish quality of Picabia’s painting. Different elements within the composition have been rendered using various types of brushstroke, and the elements barely seems to cohere into a unified image. The painting’s sense of space is compressed by the curtain blocking off the background, and the overlap of the two central figures seems to belie a coherent rendering of linear perspective. Rather than inhabiting a believable space, the figures seem collaged together on a flattened surface.

Rather than simply evidence of bad painting, these aspects make specific allusions to

Manet’s two most famous nude paintings. In essence, Picabia offers a meta-quotation of the

“mistakes and incoherencies” that critics saw characterizing paintings like Dejéuner sur l’Herbe.36 Both artists’ critical strategies rely on their work functioning within the dialectic between high and low culture. Their oppositional claims depend on their own works being treated on the same plane as those they critique—that is, within the realm of serious “high” art.

Manet’s style undercut the highly finished, finely detailed academic compositions that filled the

Salons of the mid-19th century. Pairing this intentionally poor style with quotations from the Old

Masters, Manet’s works claimed a place for themselves within the art-historical canon even as they denigrated the academic works of the time, devaluing the status of “great” art. Manet’s quotations grew out of and responded to the academic tradition by which serious painters learned their craft by copying elements from the famous works of earlier masters. Through these quotations, each successive generation of painters situated themselves within the history of art and simultaneously reaffirmed the canonical primacy of the earlier practitioners they copied.

Olympia famously appropriates from and adapts Titian’s Venus d’Urbino (1538; fig. 11), while

36 T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers, revised ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 94.

the central figural grouping in Dejéuner derives from a portion of Raphael’s and Marcantonio

Raimondi’s Judgement of Paris (c. 1510-20; fig. 12). Picabia claimed his own wide-ranging appropriations and allusions as analogous to this tradition; comparing his own “Dada spirit” with

Manet’s nihilistic stance toward “great” art, Picabia aligned his own vision of avant-gardism with Manet’s.

Picabia’s allusions to Manet’s Dejéuner and Olympia valorized Manet’s avant-gardist stance by extending Manet’s deconstructive use of the nude down into the realm of pornography.

Whereas Manet used his model Victorine Meurent for these works, to stage scenes that recalled specific tropes of prostitution in modern Paris—underscored by Meurent’s own reputation as a figure of the artistic demimonde—Picabia’s painting employs a nude woman appropriated from the pages of a pornographic magazine. The “frivolous, erotic subject matter” and “blatant sexual nature” of these pornographic images—which Picabia took for his own—is precisely the point; they are expressly designed for erotic titillation.37 Importantly, Picabia did not disown this eroticism entirely. His work was often misogynistic, and we can see that at work in these paintings as well. Like Manet, Picabia indicted the separation between highly-regarded oil paintings of female bodies and low culture that traded in the sexualization of those bodies, a separation that might be uncomfortably illusory when closely examined.

37 Cochran, “Francis Picabia’s Painting,” 17. Interestingly, Alison Smith argues that issues of prostitution and pornography are inextricably bound up with the popularization of photography as medium from as early as the 1850s, as photographers themselves grappled with genre conventions of the female nude. See The Victorian Nude: Sexuality, Morality, and Art (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1996), 55-62.

Picabia’s brushwork recalls Manet’s style of “bad painting,” using flat coloration and thick outline as an oppositional avant-garde strategy.38 Following Manet, Picabia’s paintings play with lighting and brushstroke to intentionally work his composition’s coherence. Manet’s flat, stark lighting on the central nude in Dejéuner recalls the studio interior in which she was painted, disrupting the plein-air scene’s otherwise diffuse light. Manet thus emphasized the artificiality of Dejeuner’s composition, which collaged together disparate elements into a single fictional setting.

In emulation of Manet, Picabia preserved the soft-focus lighting of the original pornographic photograph on his nude figure. The lighting accentuates the model’s body— suggesting an atmosphere of intimacy and sensuality—as well as contributing to the internal incoherence and sense of mismatch that characterizes the painting’s composition. Picabia’s pornographic lighting heavily models the nude woman, although in a manner that departs from more traditional methods of chiaroscuro. Here, Picabia seems to follow a modernist approach, using white-inflected paint to emphasize the fall of light across her skin rather than by darkening shadowed planes with black pigment mixed into his subject’s flesh tones.39 The pattern of lighting suggests a strongly directional source that originates beyond the top right corner of the frame. The sculpture, though, appears to be lit from the other direction; the gradation of white highlights transitions into more muted tones on the sculpture’s left arm and leg (situated on the viewer’s right, almost at the image’s edge), and recall the shading technique used on the live

38 Roberto Ohrt alludes to this strategy in terms of kitsch without fully fleshing out its implications. See Ohrt, “Avant-Garde Wrinkles and Realistic Artificial Light,” in Picabia: The Late Works, 1933-1953, ed. Zdenek Felix (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje, 1998), 9-16.

39 Anthea Callen, Techniques of the Impressionists, (Secaucus, NJ: Chartwell Books, 1982), 17-21. 21

figure, as the white-highlight modeling underscores the assortment of grey and black splotches across the sculpture’s surface.

Both Picabia and Manet thus employ a purposefully amateurish painting style that undermines our ability to conflate the aesthetic beauty of the painting with the erotic stimulation provided by the woman’s body. This conflation of erotic and aesthetic beauty was central to the spectatorship of the academic nude by mid-nineteenth century audiences. The nude offered the female body as a vehicle for male artists to demonstrate their skills and communicate larger artistic ideas. By painting the nude, the artist synthesized the natural, observed human form with a nonspecific idealization of classical beauty, creating a perfected view of the female body honed by centuries of academic tradition. While erotic titillation was clearly one of the main attractions for male viewers, the genre carefully followed conventions that allowed spectators to intellectualize the paintings and maintain some semblance of respectability.40 These aesthetic conventions were designed to sublimate a base response of louche voyeurism into a purified reaction to the aesthetic beauty of the painting itself. As such, the artist became an agent of transmutation, putatively desexualizing the female body into a self-contained object of pure aestheticism.

By 1863, though, this delicate balance was in danger of collapsing, as artists’ nudes became more and more eroticized, playing down the classicizing allusions that had helped maintain the genre’s respectability. Manet’s paintings responded to this decadence, explicitly equating the visual consumption of the painted nude with the prevalence of prostitution in

40 Jennifer Shaw, “The Figure of Venus: Rhetoric of the Ideal and the Salon of 1863,” Art History 14, no. 4 (December 1991), 540-41.

modern Paris. This comparison attacked the genre’s status as unassailable high art.41 Both

Déjeuner sur l’Herbe and Olympia introduced the contemporary French prostitute into the conspicuously anonymous pictorial space of the academic female nude. This introduction collapsed the distinction between the eroticism of academic high art and the ubiquitous commercial prostitution in Paris at the time. In the 1940s—as the eroticism of the interwar avant- garde had once again tipped over into a lascivious decadence—Picabia’s meta-quotation of

Manet’s distinctive style exaggerated the earlier artist’s confrontational stance. Like Manet,

Picabia used eroticism as a tool to indict a similar eroticism displayed by his peers. His appropriated pornographic photograph critiques the Surrealist use of the female body as a tool for sexual liberation. Picabia’s use of medium here is crucial, for the Surrealists used photography extensively in their own artistic program.

Photography: Surrealism and the machine

Picabia’s re-use of pornographic images underscores the lack of originality or personal expression in his art. His attitude toward photography thus differed dramatically from that of the

Surrealists. As I note above, the Surrealists saw in photography a means to pursue the uncanny by capturing unexpected fragments of reality, using images to destabilize the process of seeing.

Rather than having to laboriously paint their unconscious visions on canvas, they could simply use a machine to capture and twist the world as they perceived it. For Picabia, however, the interposition of the mechanical and chemical processes between the photographer and the image photographed worked against spontaneity and interiority. Like appropriation, photography

41 T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life, 79-146.

multiplies and transforms images that already exist; the photographer merely repurposes these images. In Femme à la Sculpture Grecque, Picabia alludes to the Freudian technique of uncanny doubling to critique the Surrealists’ view of photography and affirm his own. While the

Surrealists adopted uncanny doubling in their photographic work to affirm their sense of individualized artistic vision, transforming the material world in aesthetically revolutionary ways with their cameras, Picabia takes up the technique to highlight its basic, mimetic unoriginality.

His nude model—taken from a photograph—is copied by the “sculpture Grecque,” but rather than offering a transformational destabilization of the real, these figures simply embody a

Dadaistic refusal of meaning.

Picabia’s “sculpture Grecque”—with its mannequin-like figure that blurs the distinction between human form and artificiality—recalls Surrealist photographic tropes, especially Man

Ray’s and Raoul Ubac’s photographs of André Masson’s Mannequin (1938: figs. 13 and 14).

Both photographs picture a Surrealist construction that reduces the female form to a disturbing and sexualized assemblage of parts; further, this construction was temporary, becoming known primarily through its photographic afterlife. Masson’s mannequin figure looks out from a birdcage placed over her head; though the bottom half of her face is covered by a cloth, with a flower placed over the area of her mouth, her eyes are framed by exaggeratedly long lashes.

These quasi-feminine signifiers accentuate other areas of the mannequin’s body, as well: Masson placed roses into her armpits, framing and emphasizing her breast, and dark thread covers her crotch, simulating a patch of pubic hair that curls up into the shape of a heart. This emphasis on the sexualized anatomy of the mannequin both eroticizes and defamiliarizes the female form.

Picabia’s sculptural figure skewers the Surrealist mode of photography exemplified by

Ray and Ubac. Her awkward construction inadequately captures the likeness of the woman she

resembles, seated next to her. This woman, of course, was painted directly from a photograph.

The sculptural figure thus shows the distance between photographs of Surrealist constructions of women and photographs of women themselves—in so doing, suggesting that the Surrealists should have stuck to their quasi-pornographic photos of actual women. Although Picabia’s

“sculpture Grecque” is meant to recall the idealization of feminine beauty characteristic of ancient Greek sculpture, she instead resembles Masson’s department-store mannequin. Placed alongside the nude model, the sculpture recalls but fails to believably replicate her likeness, and therefore the erotic beauty she is meant to convey. Unlike the exaggerated sexuality of Masson’s mannequin, Picabia’s sculpture does not eroticize the female body it resembles. In Picabia’s treatment, then, the Surrealist mannequin construction fails even to render the erotic female body as well as a mass-market pornographic photo.

More specifically, the inexact mirroring of the two figures in Femme à la Sculpture

Grecque refers to the Freudian concept of the uncanny double, central to Surrealist practice. For

Surrealists, artistic doubling offered reliable methods through which to access what Freud termed the “uncanny.”42 According to Freud, the human form, with its innate familiarity, offered fruitful material for this process of uncanny doubling. Dolls, mannequins, and other crafted replicas of the human body inspire “doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate.”43 The Surrealists used

42 Sigmund Freud. “The ‘Uncanny,’” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII (1917-1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, edited by James Strachey, Anna Freud, and Angela Richards (London: Hogarth Press, 1981), 217-256. Loosely defined, the uncanny is that which makes the familiar appear unfamiliar, with an ensuing anxiety that arises from the subconscious mind.

43 Freud, “The Uncanny,” 226.

repetitions or near-repetitions of the female to recall “the old, animistic conception of the universe” in which humans’ “figments of the imagination… strove to withstand the inexorable laws of reality.”44 For Freud, the multiplicative process of uncanny doubling destabilized the conscious mind’s grasp on the world. These near-repetitions of familiar forms aroused a primal response in the viewer that foregrounded the pre-rational realm of the unconscious. It was precisely this reaction that the Surrealists hoped to provoke in their viewers by applying Freud’s theories to their art.

By mechanically appropriating a photographic source, Picabia poked fun at the

Surrealists’ use of photomontage and other techniques to achieve the effect of uncanny doubling.45 Indeed, Cochran contends that Picabia was particularly interested in replicating photographs of women in which the lens distorted their features. If this is the case, then we can see Picabia taking on Surrealist photography’s mechanical techniques as well as its content.46

Picabia’s painting challenges the avant-gardism of photographic artists such as Man Ray and

Brassaï, suggesting that their supposedly unprecedented experiments merely rehash artistic strategies of quotation and recombination that have deep roots in painterly tradition. Further,

Picabia’s use of pornographic source material indicts the implied voyeurism of works such as La

Prière (1930; fig. 7), equating Surrealists’ supposedly revolutionary use of photography with this mass-market erotica. Picabia’s title even quotes Ray’s Noire et Blanche (1926; fig. 15). On one

44 Freud, “The Uncanny,” 240-41.

45 Krauss, “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism,” October 19 (Winter 1981), 3-34. She explores Surrealist photographic distortion in greater detail in “Corpus Delicti,” October 33 (Summer 1985), 31- 72.

46 Cochran, “Francis Picabia’s Painting,” 27.

level, Ray’s title references both the process of photography. But it also refers the collision between the white body of the female model and the blackness of the sculpture she holds – a blackness both of material and of cultural association.47

Cameras allowed artists like Ray to supposedly bypass the rational and conscious artistic that painting required, allowing fragments of defamiliarized reality to be captured by mechanical means. This theoretical approach, though, obscures the extent to which Surrealist photographs were carefully staged and altered to defamiliarize their subjects. Picabia’s two figures, painted from photographic sources, stage the artifice inherent in this contradiction. Their careful incongruities of lighting and scale, the subtle mirroring of their poses, and the visible, emphatic brushwork, suggest the gulf between the carefree, unedited fantasy Breton constructed around the Surrealist practice of automatic art-making and the laborious, heavily-constructed works created by the artists.

Moreover, Picabia’s painting directly challenges Surrealism’s claim to a revolutionary aesthetic. From its inception, Breton envisioned Surrealism as the catalyst for sweeping change.48 Over time, this revolutionary rhetoric became more pointed, as Breton and the other

Surrealists engaged with the political foment pervading interwar intellectual society.49 These entanglements, which primarily played out in the pages of literary journals and published manifestos, came to dominate the group’s collective life over the second half of the 1920s and through the next decade. Breton was at the forefront of these political maneuverings, steadily isolating the group from the larger political context of interwar France as he cultivated a series of

47 I will explore the overlap of Surrealist eroticism and primitivism in the next chapter.

48 Helena Lewis, The Politics of Surrealism (New York: Paragon House, 1988), 24-27.

49 Lewis, The Politics of Surrealism, 34-36.

feuds and estrangements with other editors and writers in the political vanguard. Picabia’s

“sculpture Grecque” indicts this Surrealist political program, comparing their revolutionary aspirations with those of the “return to order” artistic movements following the First World War.

Sculpture: The feminine ideal and the Surrealist “return to order”

Picabia’s poorly-rendered “Greek sculpture”—its essential inadequacy to measure up to its Greek antecedents—asks us to challenge the title’s comparison. By introducing the context of

Hellenic classicism into his work, Picabia puts the painting—at least partially—in the classicizing framework of the “return to order” adopted by many other interwar artists. This

“return to order” formed a reaction to the seeming crisis of civilization following the cataclysmic horrors of World War I. 50 Whereas the Dadaists saw the war as the logical endpoint of a sick society that needed to be torn down and dispensed with, the “return to order” artists believed that the enlightened rationality and philosophical first principles of classicism offered an antidote to the modernizing ills that had thrown Europe into conflict.

Picabia’s version of a “sculpture Grecque,” though—painted during another World

War—challenges the adequacy of the return to order’s proposed solution to the crisis of civilization. His title describes the sculpture as “black and white,” complicating the neutral purity signified by the material’s original whiteness by introducing the value’s opposite. The whiteness of antique Greek marble sculptures captured the imagination of “return to order” artists, signifying the purity of the Greeks’ rational artistic thought and the ultimate idealization of

50 Benjamin Buchloh, investigating this dynamic, has explicitly claimed that the “return to order” represented the ascension of a derivative artistic cautiousness that paved the way for fascists to control a nationalistic discourse of regressive mythmaking. Buchloh, “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of Representation in European Painting,” October 16 (Spring 1981), 39-68.

human beauty.51 But if a white sculpture offers purity, rationality, and beauty, what does a black- and-white sculpture embody? Indeed, while some of the blackened areas on the sculpture’s body appear to designate areas of loss—for instance, the chunk missing from her chin—others, like the large patch on her right shoulder or the numerous grey splotches on her thigh, are harder to discern.52 While I have previously indicated that these splotches seem to indicate decay or tarnish, Picabia has not realistically rendered those processes. Rather than seeing a skilled painting of a sculpture that has lost its luster and begun to crack, we see a poorly-painted version of a figure with historical implications that are conveyed chiefly because of the title Picabia assigned to the painting.

Picabia’s “bad” version of classicism, as embodied by his “sculpture Grecque,” references the Purist movement, emblematic of the “return to order” in France following World

War I. These artists, who had largely been experimenting with abstraction before the war, shifted to a more traditional stylistic practice in the 1920s: their work was marked by a resurgence of interest in classical style, legible subject matter, and conservative themes. In 1918, Amédée

Ozenfant and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret published a manifesto for the Purist movement entitled

After Cubism, in which they deconstructed the style’s “decorative” shortcomings and advocated

51 The “return to order” artists were not the only ones to explore the symbolic whiteness of Greek sculpture. Charmaine Nelson, for instance, has linked this manifestation of whiteness as purity and idealizing objectivity to evolving discourses of race in nineteenth-century American culture. See Charmaine A. Nelson, “’So Pure and Celestial a Light’: Sculpture, Marble, and Whiteness as a Privileged Racial Signifier,” in The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 57-72.

52 A line from the Purist manifesto After Cubism seems appropriate here: “There are no lighting conditions under which clay will have the color of flesh; if chance should produce such an appearance, this must be regarded as an accident unworthy of great art.” Amédée Ozenfant and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, Après le Cubisme (Paris: Edition des Commentaires, 1918). Reprinted in L’Esprit Nouveau: Purism in Paris 1918-1925, trans. John Goodman, ed. Carol S. Eliel (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2001), 161.

for an art that “is invariable… general, static, [and] expressive of what is constant.”53 In order to accomplish this, they looked to the lessons of Greek antiquity: art should distill the truth of the natural world into essential principles and represent those principles on the canvas. Legér’s Le

Grande Dejéuner (Three Women) (1921-22; fig. 16) exemplifies the classicizing tropes taken up in the Purist return to order. His painting pictures an interior scene populated by three nude women: two reclining, one seated. This treatment of a common theme in art history shows the women reduced to blocky assemblages of rounded, shining shapes that emphasize their volume.

The two reclining women have been rendered in a silvery white that resembles marble sculpture rather than skin tone. This supposed idealization and classicization of a traditional composition instead moves the women away from a believable representation, rooting the work in modernist abstraction more than in Greek antiquity. Picabia’s own “sculpture Grecque” loosely quotes this treatment, similarly claiming to be descended from the idealized beauty of antiquity while failing to measure up to that example.

Picabia’s parodic “sculpture Grecque” attacks the pretensions of the Purists’ artistic stance in a manner that recalls Benjamin Buchloh’s claim about “return to order” artists in the interwar period:

Style, the very gem of reified art-historical thinking, the fiction that there could be

a pictorial mode or a discursive practice that might function autonomously—

traditionally rejected by artists—is now applied by the artists to imbue these

exhausted modes with historical meaning.54

53 Ozenfant and Jeanneret, After Cubism, 165.

54 Buchloh, “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression” 52.

Here, Buchloh points to an essential problem within “return to order” aesthetics. The Purists and their peers conflated artistic order with political order, arguing that adopting a classicized style of artmaking would lead to the reordering of society along enlightened classical lines. In this sense, they argued that painting like the ancient Greeks would help Europe return to living like the ancient Greeks. However, this equation overlooked—and perhaps helped pave the way for— nationalist political movements that similarly used conservative values and appeals to an imagined classical past to assert fascistic control over European populations in the interwar period.

Against the grain, Picabia’s “sculpture Grecque” links Surrealist tropes of eros and the uncanny with their seeming opposite: the “return to order” political aesthetics that accompanied

Europe’s increasingly conservative political values. For Picabia, who prized the raucous anarchism and deconstructive imperative of the “Dada spirit” as it “existed between 1913 and

1918,” André Breton’s tight-fisted control over Paris Dada and Surrealism encapsulated the larger reactionary politics sweeping Europe between the World Wars.55 Even as the Surrealists worked to establish an intelligible political stance that would situate their artistic “research” into the larger upheavals of the interwar period, they gained a reputation for distasteful reactionary politics.56 While Breton sought to redefine the paradigms of Communist thought in service of artistic ideals, his “search for ‘absolute reality,’ that union between the dream and the waking world, was irrelevant and, at worst, it was counter-revolutionary.”57 Worse still, the Surrealists

55 Picabia, “Mr. Picabia Breaks with the Dadas,” 145.

56 Lewis, The Politics of Surrealism, 19.

57 Lewis, The Politics of Surrealism, 138.

had to contend with the iconoclastic provocations of Salvador Dalí, one of their most prominent affiliates, who in 1938 adopted a mode of “aesthetic fascism” and publicly proclaimed sexual fantasies centering around Hitler’s body.58 In a time of pitched political upheaval as Europe lurched to the brink of the Second World War, this flailing and inchoate revolutionary stance led to the Surrealists’ increasing characterization as a movement abetting the worst political impulses of the time.

Picabia’s “sculpture Grecque” compares the Surrealists’ reactionary politics with its eroticization of the female form, dismissing both as retrograde, insufficiently avant-garde, and a betrayal of the “Dada spirit.” In both its politics and its artistic content, the Surrealists adopted postures of artistic liberation and revolution, although these postures were in reality carefully orchestrated and overseen by André Breton. Rather than offering the radical egalitarianism that

Breton’s Communist affiliations would seem to suggest, the group always resembled an autocracy under him. Further, Picabia placed the Surrealists’ political and artistic agendas in conversation with along the “return to order’s” reliance on representational figuration and the human form. Both groups, he felt, nominally pursued avant-garde artistic aims while instead espousing programmatic, nationalistic political views and rehashing “exhausted modes” of artistic expression.59

58 Lewis, The Politics of Surrealism, 152. She quotes Dalí as saying that “I was fascinated by Hitler’s soft, round back always so tightly encased in his uniform…in fact, he was preparing one of those gratuitous acts which were at the time very much appreciated by our group.” The canonical “gratuitous act” that spurred the Surrealist imagination was Jacques Vaché’s 1918 murder-suicide by opium overdose.

59 Buchloch, “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression,” 39-68. See also Roger Rothman, “Dalí’s Inauthenticity,” Modernism/Modernity 14, no. 3 (September 2007): 489-497, in which Rothman argues that Dalí turned to classicizing forms and representation in general as a strategy for modernist destabilization, embracing illusion and deception as an overt artistic/political strategy.

Basing his composition on two figures who embody a range of adapted quotations and appropriations, Picabia offered a direct critique of the Surrealists’ claims to originality.

Exaggerating Manet’s confrontational use of low-culture nudity in his paintings, Picabia compared the Surrealists’ erotic treatments of the female body to the pornographic photography on which he based his own nude. Quoting Legér’s Purist women in a poor echo of classical

Greek sculpture, Picabia compared the Surrealist political program to its seeming opposite, the post-World War I “return to order.” Picabia used this allusion to nod to Breton’s tight control over the Surrealist group, which he saw paralleling Surrealism’s flirtation with radical politics in the 1930s. Further, by having his “sculpture Grecque” inadequately mirror his nude figure,

Picabia attacked the Freudian underpinnings of the Surrealist philosophy, undercutting the supposed originality of “uncanny doubling” as simply a pretentious, less effective version of the types of quotations and allusions he pointed to in his own work and Manet’s. In every respect, then, the formal elements of Femme à la Sculpture Grecque deride the Surrealist artistic program as derivative, artistically insufficient, and a corruption of the avant-garde “Dada spirit” which

Picabia saw animating his own practice.

CHAPTER 2

FEMME À L’IDOLE

In this chapter, I argue that Picabia’s Femme à l’Idole (fig. 2) serves as a pendant of sorts to his Femme à la Sculpture Grecque Noire et Blanche. Through references to Manet’s nudes, the latter painting articulated a complex critique of Surrealism’s proto-fascist politics and its hollow rhetoric of erotic liberation. In a similarly irreverent Dada gesture, Femme à l’Idole loosely quotes the work of Paul Gauguin in order to satirize the Surrealist fascination with

“primitive” cultures. As in Femme à la Sculpture, in Femme à l’Idole an eroticized nude appropriated from a photographic source interacts with an ambiguous sculptural object. In this case, though, the sculpture does not allude to the classical tradition: it is labeled an “idol” and depicted to resemble carved wood. Cochran, in her extensive research on this body of work, calls the figure African in origin without offering any explanation for this designation; other accounts of the painting do not even mention its source.60 I argue that this statue instead quotes Gauguin’s visual vocabulary of Tahitian idoles, which Gauguin used to signify the authenticity of his assimilation into Tahitian culture. By incorporating non-European visual symbols into his paintings, Gauguin hoped to demonstrate the extent to which his art challenged the cultural norms of Parisian society. Quoting Gauguin’s idoles just as he quoted Manet’s nudes, Picabia advanced a particular narrative of the French avant-garde: in his rendering, Manet and Gauguin originated the “Dada spirit” from which his practice descended.

Through this idole figure, Picabia critiques the Surrealists’ claims to sexual liberation and their belief in the revolutionary potential of contact with “primitive” cultures. However,

Picabia’s relationship to Gauguin is more complicated than the case of Manet discussed above.

60 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), 19. 34

First, it should be noted that Picabia does not indict the racism intrinsic to Gauguin’s depictions of Tahitian culture. Somewhat counter-intuitively, Picabia uses Gauguin to satirize the notion that the artist can “find himself” by exploring his “primitive” side. Further, in order to align his

“Dada spirit” with Gauguin’s art, Picabia had to draw out Gauguin’s more covert practices of appropriation. Finally, Picabia drew parallels between Gauguin’s decision to leave Paris and isolate himself in Tahiti with his own departure for the south of France in the 1920s. Picabia sought to show that this distance from Parisian culture allowed Gauguin to flourish as an avant- garde artist. By embarking on a similar departure, Picabia claimed that he thus merited a similar mantle within the avant-garde canon.

As in the previous chapter, I argue here that by juxtaposing avant-garde art with pornographic photographs Picabia collapsed the distinction between high and low culture; in so doing, he attacked the Surrealists’ claim to a revolutionary aesthetic, instead essentially branding them as mere pornographers. Femme à l’Idole explores the overlaps between Surrealist eroticism and exoticism—that is, the ways in which Surrealism’s fascination with control over the female body resembles its fascination with control over the “primitive,” and its appropriation of indigenous cultural elements from its seat in Paris. In this context, we can see Picabia attempting to wrest control over Gauguin’s artistic legacy—and that of the French avant-garde more generally—from the Surrealists. Gauguin’s explorations of the mysticism of artistic vision and his interactions with the “primitive” deeply informed the Surrealists’ artistic practice, especially

Breton’s quasi-ethnographic fascination with “primitive” cultures. Picabia’s painting instead claims that Gauguin was working in the same “Dada spirit” that Picabia espoused in his own practice. This claim foregrounds the artistic appropriations and adaptations on which Gauguin’s practice relied, as well as emphasizing the geographic and spiritual distance between Gauguin

and the insular Parisian artistic circles of his time. Rather than seeing the Surrealists as the inheritors of Gauguin’s avant-gardism, then, Picabia placed himself in that lineage.

Quoting Gauguin’s Idole

Like Femme à la Sculpture Grecque, Femme à l’Idole relies on appropriation and allusion. Picabia based its composition on a photograph from a 1937 issue of Mon Paris magazine (fig. 17), lifting the female figure directly and replacing elements of the scene around her. In the foreground, a woman in lingerie, garter stockings, and high heels climbs into the arms of another figure: not the seated male figure dressed as a doctor who appears in the original photograph, but a life-sized wooden statue, the titular idole. The woman’s hair obscures her face as she bends over the sculpture, and her hand rests on the sculpture’s prominent breast. In addition to the idole’s breasts, its clearly visible pubic mound and labia mark the figure as female. Instead of the richly-wallpapered domestic interior setting featured in the photograph,

Picabia has rendered a strange, arbitrarily-colored scene.

Picabia’s use of the term “idole” almost certainly alludes to Gauguin’s frequent use of such figures, and his wooden sculpture bears a striking resemblance to a number of Tahitian

“idols” in Gauguin’s late works: Rave te Hiti Aamu (The Idol) (1898; fig. 18); The Great Buddha

(1899; fig. 19); Tahitian Idol – The Goddess Hina (1894-95; fig. 20); and Idole à la Coquille

(1892-93; fig. 21). Notably, Picabia’s idole does not exactly resemble any one of these figures; freely combining elements from each, he created a simulacrum that strongly signaled its source without faithfully copying it. This loose allusion resembles his approach with Manet – in both cases, he suggests connections without explicit quotation. In Picabia’s rendering, the idole’s facial characteristics come from The Goddess Hina and The Great Buddha—the oversized,

almond-shaped eyes, the broad, flat triangular nose, and the severely delineated hairline that defines the curvature of the skull. Her corporeal features are borrowed from Rave te Hiti Aamu and Idole à la Coquille—the prominent breasts and the enveloping curvature of the arms.

As Picabia’s allusive figure suggests, Gauguin’s practice relied heavily on sampling, allusion, and quotation: the latter’s supposedly visionary compositions were constellations of recombined images from a broad array of sources. In this respect, Picabia highlighted a distinct commonality that linked his own practice to both Manet and Gauguin, two respected artists prized for their oppositional avant-gardism. Femme à l’Idole’s title and central action both center on the idole and its interaction with the femme figure. However, the idole was created by replicating distinctive elements from several appropriated images, thus undercutting its unique claim to originality. This process replicates and challenges Gauguin’s own visually syncretic practice, complicating the earlier artist’s claims to originality and, therefore, his visionary genius.

Gauguin strove to make his paintings look authentically Tahitian, and thus played down the extent to which—like Manet—his practice depended on quotation and adaptation.

Nevertheless, his art offered up an exoticized mélange of primitivist signifiers as a direct challenge to France’s societal and aesthetic norms.61 He saw “primitive” cultures as a corrective to the dehumanizing modernism of urban Paris, offering a return to a more natural and authentic state of human experience. The primitivizing elements in Gauguin’s work, rather than offering a careful explication of Tahitian cultural history, were largely cobbled together from photographs he took with him from France—a “musée imaginaire” that he used to catalyze his artistic

61 Elizabeth Childs, “The Colonial Lens: Gauguin, Primitivism, and Photography in the Fin-de-Siècle,” in Antimodernism and Artistic Experience: Policing the Boundaries of Modernity, ed. Lynda Jessup (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001): 57-58.

production in the absence of other avant-garde painters.62 Further, he often repeated key pictorial elements and motifs in his works, such as the idole figures that show up throughout his practice in numerous materials, including stoneware and woodblock prints.63 The prints are particularly interesting from the standpoint of reproduction and artistic originality, for it appears that

Gauguin’s idole figure in Rave te Hiti Aamu—the Tahitian goddess of mourning, Oviri—first appeared in a series of prints between 1895 and 1898.64

Picabia’s combination of several distinct idoles into a single figure makes clear that he viewed Gauguin’s art as essentially iterative: like Picabia, he took themes and images from earlier sources and adapted them across multiple works, culminating in an intertextually rich practice. For Picabia, this intertextuality undercut the idea of the artist-genius simply painting his interior vision of the world – an idea that Gauguin himself articulated in his practice. Gauguin saw himself honestly interpreting Tahitian culture through his art, manifesting his interior vision of the world around him. Thus, Picabia’s claim for inheriting Gauguin’s avant-garde mantle lays forth a very particular reading of Gauguin’s practice that plays down Gauguin’s own public self- conception.

62 Childs, “The Colonial Lens,” 53. Gauguin’s previous work relied on a wide and idiosyncratic array of stylistic antecedents and prompts—including Japanese woodblock prints, Manet paintings, and the work of his contemporaries—and the photographs he brought with him to Polynesia constituted the raw materials from which he created his paintings.

63 Harriet K. Stratis, “Disrupting Convention: Gauguin’s Unique Multiples and Transfers,” in Gauguin: Artist as Alchemist, ed. Gloria Groom (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 2017): 40-41.

64 Stratis, “Disrupting Convention,” 40-41. Interestingly, although Gauguin’s paintings of idoles tend to represent the figures as being made of stone, Picabia renders his idole figure in wood. This choice, which follows Gauguin’s own sculptures, including Idol with a Shell, also references the medium of woodblock printing.

Gauguin drew a distinction between artistic creation and mere mimesis, stressing the artistic imperative to create rather than simply to copy.65 For him, the artistic spirit “acts as a filter between the self and the world and can also be interpreted as an instrument of distillation.”66 This distinction (somewhat counterintuitively) reaffirmed Picabia’s view of himself as an artistic “filter,” selecting and reworking images within his own practice. In Femme

à l’Idole, Picabia “invents” a figure made of recognizable elements from Gauguin’s oeuvre.

Those earlier figures, of course, were also “invented” in the same way: Gauguin appropriated them from earlier photographs and works of art. In this alignment, then, Picabia not only challenged the core claim of originality and invention as the basis of artistic merit, but also, by the same stroke, elevated himself alongside a canonical avant-garde figure in whose practice he saw an antecedent for his own. Highlighting an often-overlooked aspect of Gauguin’s practice that resembled his own methods, Picabia’s idole placed the artist’s work explicitly in conversation with Gauguin’s. Although Gauguin worked to establish his art as an authentic representation of Tahitian culture, Picabia instead drew out an aspect of Gauguin’s practice that resembled his own sensibility. With this strategy, Picabia advanced a view of avant-gardism that distinguished between art “as an instrument of distillation” and art as the Surrealists practiced it—a stylistic performance of otherness and exoticism that depended on the myth of individualized artistic genius.67

65 Dario Gamboni, Paul Gauguin: The Mysterious Centre of Thought (London: Reaktion Books, 2014): 29-30.

66 Gamboni, The Mysterious Centre of Thought, 30.

67 Gamboni, The Mysterious Centre of Thought, 30.

The Politics of Leaving Paris

For Picabia, the element that truly distinguished Gauguin’s practice as avant-garde—and as a parallel to his own—was the act of “going away.” Departing the suffocating strictures of

Parisian life allowed avant-gardists the distance to truly free themselves from its influence. The

Surrealists took a very different lesson from Gauguin. For them, Gauguin’s seeming ability to harness both his subjective reality and the influence of “primitive” culture lay at the heart of his avant-garde practice. Their artistic philosophy grew directly from this model, resting on the interiority of Gauguin’s artistic vision rather than his immersion in Tahitian culture. Though they were fascinated by “primitive” art, considering themselves ethnographers of non-European cultures, they never truly immersed themselves in other cultures, preferring instead to arrange disparate elements from those cultures within their homes and studios in Paris.68 However,

Picabia saw this Paris-based experimentation as fundamentally incompatible with the type of avant-gardism Gauguin represented, with the Surrealists instead simply performing the stylistic tropes of Gauguin’s practice.

The Surrealists, from their perch in Paris, gravitated toward the magical and transformative properties that they believed specific objects from “primitive” cultures embodied.69 These artists saw non-European cultures as being in touch with an occultism and magic of the natural world that the modernized cultures of Europe had lost.70 Breton was especially enthusiastic about collecting objects of Surrealist interest; his private collection included

68 Louisa Tythacott, Surrealism and the Exotic (New York: Routledge Books, 2003): 5-6.

69 Tythacott, Surrealism and the Exotic, 72.

70 Tythacott, Surrealism and the Exotic, 71.

among other things, stuffed birds, cases of tropical butterflies, coins, minerals, crystals,

glass bottles, objects made by psychiatric patients, books, paintings by Henri Rousseau,

prints by Edvard Munch, drawings by Seurat and Adolf Wölfi, sculptures by Giacometti,

objets trouvées, masks, sculptures and exotic artefacts from Africa, Oceania, and the

Americas.71

This compendium points to one of the essential features of Surrealist object culture: namely, the collection and display of these objects relied on intentional decontextualization. Pairing non-

European art objects with “objects made by psychiatric patients” or “stuffed birds,” Breton attempted to defamiliarize the viewer’s response to these objects through unexpected associations prompted by their juxtaposition.

The Surrealists did not pursue cultural specificity or ethnographic rigor in the objects they procured from other cultures; rather, they sought out the randomness and disjointedness of a multiplicity of objects. The magic and aesthetic strangeness they pursued in object culture was essentially bound to an idea of “normal” Parisian culture. Everything that they brought into their artistic practice worked against this implicit Parisian baseline. Objects from foreign cultures had currency for the Surrealists because of their apparently anti-modern, non-urban, un-civilized character, rather than any specific or intrinsic feature of their own culture. Thus, despite their claims to an ethnology of objecthood, the Surrealists reified embedded assumptions of European primacy, which they nominally sought to undercut.72 Although their notions of foreign and

71 Tythacott, Surrealism and the Exotic, 43.

72 This is not to claim any sort of moral authority for Picabia’s stance here; his practice never relied on occupying the moral high ground before impugning other artists.

indigenous cultures resembled Gauguin’s interactions with Polynesian culture in Tahiti—an incomplete and prejudicial understanding of foreign culture that presumed the European model as the standard against which other societies must be measured—Picabia recognized an essential difference between the two practices.73

Though Gauguin’s practice was racist, colonialist, and woefully primitivizing, for Picabia the essential element was that Gauguin transformed his art by leaving Paris and immersing himself in a culture beyond it. Picabia mirrored this precept of Gauguin’s practice in the mid-

1920s, when he departed Paris and lived for the next two decades on the southern coast of

France. The Midi region had traditionally been understood as a foil to Paris’ urbanism, offering vacation locales for tourists and picturesque views for landscape painters. This period of self- exile also corresponded with an increased variance in source material from which Picabia created works, from “Romanesque wall-paintings of Catalonia” and “woodcuts of the 15th century” to the pornography at the heart of the World War II nudes.74 Picabia’s rejection of the tumult of modern urban Paris thus found resonance with Gauguin’s similar rejection almost a half-century earlier. By never going away, on the other hand, Breton and the Surrealists simply performed the assimilation of indigenous influence in their own works.

73 This loaded hierarchical understanding is endemic to the history of Europe’s cultural interactions with foreign cultures. Edward Said’s canonical text Orientalism helps to define the ramifications of this stance and the ways in which it has pervaded studies of foreign cultures. See Said, Orientalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986).

74 Roberto Ohrt, “Avant-Garde Wrinkles and Realistic Artificial Light,” in Picabia: The Late Works, 1933-1953, ed. Zdenek Felix (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje, 1998), 11. 42

The Femme and l’Idole

Picabia’s painting places this Surrealist fascination with the “primitive” in dialogue with the group’s erotic obsessions. Of course, Gauguin was similarly obsessed with the erotic. He entered sexual relationships several adolescent Tahitian women while living on the island, often relying on their families for financial support.75 These women became the subjects of many of his paintings from this oeuvre, which specifically emphasized their sexuality. In The Spirit of the

Dead Watching (Manao Tupapau) (1892; fig. 22), Gauguin pictures his fourteen-year-old wife

Teha’amana lying nude and on her stomach on a bed, staring out at the viewer. Behind her, the bedroom dissolves into colorful abstraction while a hooded figure, seen in profile, sits watch.76

The exposure of Teha’amana’s body to the viewer, the vulnerability of her prone pose, and the fear in her eyes combine to create a scene of sexual voyeurism, even predation.77 This painting encapsulates the extent to which Gauguin interwove a transgressive sense of sexual fantasy into his larger program of imaginative primitivism. Pederasty with non-European women was, for

French colonialists, seen as categorically different from an adult man having sex with an underage white woman.78 For Gauguin, his relationship with Teha’amana offered its own

75 Abigail Solomon-Goudeau, “Going Native: Paul Gauguin and the Invention of Primitivist Modernism,” in The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History, ed. Norma Broude and Mary Gerard (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), 325.

76 Interestingly, this other figure’s exaggerated, primitivizing features recall those from Gauguin’s idole figures.

77 Griselda Pollock, Avant-Garde Gambits 1888-1893: Gender and the Color of Art History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992): 25-28. Pollock grounds her analysis of the Gauguin painting in its visual similarities to Manet’s Olympia. Her argument dovetails with my investigation of Picabia’s Femme à la Sculpture Grecque in the previous chapter, where I show Picabia similarly aligning himself with Manet using, in part, visual allusions to Olympia.

78 Solomon-Goudeau, “Going Native,” 325.

revolutionary frisson, a means through which he could demonstrate his departure from the culture of his bourgeois peers in Paris.

Femme à l’Idole—with a lingerie-wearing, featureless woman climbing into the arms of a

Gauguin-Polynesian idole—pictures the intersection of eroticism and exoticism at the heart of the Surrealists’ revolutionary rhetoric. The femme climbs up into the arms of the “primitive”

Gauguin-esque idole, using its body as leverage to raise herself higher as she looks down on it.

The purposeful positioning of these two figures visually enacts the colonialist relationship inherent in the French avant-garde treatment of foreign cultures, establishing a power dynamic that undermines the legitimacy of non-European art. The scene’s eroticism further underscores this power dynamic. Modeling his composition directly on a pornographic photograph, Picabia grounds his painting in low-culture associations.

Picabia’s adaptation of pornography leveraged the distinction between obscenity and art—a distinction that has long been used to classify pornography in opposition to works of artistic intent.79 Although the pornography-sourced femme is not shown nude, she wears lingerie, gartered stockings, and high heels – sartorial elements that accentuate her eroticism. A nude female body in painting can carry an array of possible semiotic meaning; in fact, it is precisely this ambiguity that fuels the genre of the female nude, allowing for readings that ostensibly mute the figure’s sexual appeal.80 Conversely, the combination of lingerie the femme wears—

79 For a further discussion of the distinction between art and pornography in the medium of photography, see Alison Smith, The Victorian Nude: Sexuality, Morality, and Art (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1996): 55-62, and Carol Armstrong, “Cupid’s Pencil of Light: Julia Margaret Cameron and the Maternalization of Photography,” October 76 (Spring 1996): 114-141.

80 I investigate this dynamic in greater depth in the first chapter. For just one example of this ongoing debate in French art history, see Jennifer Shaw, “The Figure of Venus: Rhetoric of the Ideal and the Salon of 1863,” Art History 14, no. 4 (December 1991), 540-41.

simultaneously suggesting states of dress and undress—narrows the range of possible meanings, clearly telegraphing sexual potential.

By substituting for the male doctor in the original photograph for a female “idol,” Picabia introduces a homoerotic element into the grouping that defuses the original intent of the image.

The femme and the idole enact a Sapphic scene, one whose heightened sense of voyeurism— removing any masculine figure from the canvas and positing the sexual act about to take place as entirely feminine in nature—seems intended for the delectation of a male viewer. This dichotomy between woman as sexual object and man as agent of sexual act (in that Picabia painted this scene of lesbian congress) exemplifying the Surrealist trope of men creating art using women’s bodies as erotic inspiration and as artistic material. The femme figure’s face and genitals, turned away from the viewer, are hidden; her sexuality is signaled through her clothing, the bare expanse of her back, and the intimacy of her pose. By contrast, the idole’s sexual characteristics are emphatically in view, both in the prominence of her bare breasts and the clear outlining of her labia against the background wall. In this sexual specificity, the figure evokes fertility idols, such as the Venus of Willendorf (c. 28,000-25,000 BCE; fig. 23). This subset of

“primitive” art fascinated the Surrealists, who thrilled to the exotic sexual magic these works seemed designed to harness.

This titillating linkage between the female body and idol mirrors a dynamic found in numerous Surrealist works. Man Ray’s Noire et Blanche (1926; fig. 16) offers a succinct example. The photograph—first published in Vogue and helping spark mainstream Parisian appeal for primitivist art—shows Ray’s lover Kiki de Montparnasse posing nude with an

“African Baule-style mask from the Ivory Coast.”81 Hair tightly pulled back, eyes closed, and resting her cheek on a table in the immediate foreground, she appears asleep and dreaming. This composition reduces her to

a disembodied head whose chalky white face is juxtaposed with the darkly stained mask.

Almost as if it were a direct cast, the vertical mask, with its shiny black patina, is a

negative mirror image of the reclining model’s ovoid face, echoing her pursed lips,

closed eyes, and tautly styled coiffure. Parallel symmetrical shadows extend beneath the

two perpendicular forms, coupling face and mask in a shallow and austere space.82

This Baule mask was made specifically to cater to French touristic taste. After France’s colonization of the Ivory Coast, these types of objects became widely available in Paris’ flea markets and curio shops.83 Noire et Blanche, therefore, enacts this quintessentially Surrealist paradigm, coupling the epitome of the sexualized Parisian New Woman—in the figure of de

Montparnasse—with an exoticized signifier of the artistic traditions of a “primitive” culture.

Though Parisians at the time would not have seen it as such, the mask itself becomes as iconic of urban modernism as de Montparnasse herself. Rather than functioning as a static artifact from a

“primitive” culture untouched by the modernizing impulse sweeping across Europe, the mask— made by the colonized in order to capitalize on the tastes of the colonizers—signifies that very

81 Wendy A. Grossman and Steven Manford, “Unmasking Man Ray’s Noire et Blanche,” American Art 20, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 134-135.

82 Grossman and Manford, “Unmasking Man Ray’s Noire et Blanche,” 137.

83 Grossman and Manford, “Unmasking Man Ray’s Noire et Blanche,” 136. Joshua Cohen explores a similar trend in relation to Fauve art, tracing the provenance of a Fang-style mask that made its way around the circle of Vlaminck and his compatriots a decade and a half prior. The Fang mask in question was similarly created specifically for white European audiences, as the French colonization created a foreign market for emblematic artifacts of native cultures in Africa. See Joshua Cohen, “Fauve Masks: Rethinking Modern ‘Primitivist’ Uses of African and Oceanic Art, 1905-8,” Art Bulletin 99, no. 2 (June 2017): 136-165. 46

sweep, emblematizing the market economics and hierarchies of cultural dominance from which the mask emerged.

Picabia’s critique does not target the racist and exploitative cast of this primitivist dynamic directly, though. Instead, Femme à l’Idole indicts Breton and the Surrealists for not drawing a distinction between the mass-market appeal of colonialist ephemera and the revolutionary potential they claimed for their exploration of “primitive” cultures. Just as Picabia equated their rhetoric of sexual liberation with pornography, he drew a direct line between their ethnographic studies and the flea-market artifacts of French colonialism. The pairing of the femme and the idole suggests the entanglement of these two subjects with which the Surrealists were most fascinated. This entanglement is further signaled by the manner in which the two figures’ heads overlap; the curve of the femme’s head as she leans over completes the shape of the idole’s head behind her, and the idole’s sharply delineated hairline flows naturally into the femme’s locks. The mirroring of the heads recalls Man Ray’s similar strategy in Noire et

Blanche, in which de Montparnasse’s head mirrors the shape and shadowing of the mask that she holds next to her. Whereas Ray’s photograph emphasizes the smooth allure of this conflation between woman and object, Picabia’s painting instead elicits discomfort.

Picabia further sharpens the discomfort elicited by his two figures’ interactions by placing them in a largely unreadable setting. The Mon Paris photograph from which Picabia appropriated his femme figure offered a richly rendered domestic setting, with a comfortable bed and inviting floral wallpaper. This scene, rooted in French domesticity and the conservative values of family life, situates the photograph’s erotic action in an atmosphere of legible intimacy.

Picabia excises the erotic act from the domestic context, placing it instead in an unreadable space, with a crimson floor under a dark green wall whose harsh lighting and sharp geometric

angles offer no clear, cohesive meaning. All furniture has been removed; the closest analog presented is the body of the idole itself. This enigmatic background, with its careful attention to lighting effects and coloration, perhaps offers a critique of avant-garde geometric abstraction.

The strong horizontal bands and plays with tonality in the background suggest a flirtation with non-representational geometric painting. However, by staging the work as the backdrop for a quasi-realistic figural scene, Picabia suggest the unsuitability of that style of abstraction. Forcing figures to cohere to an inhospitable non-space critiques the basic lifelessness of non-figural abstract art. In Femme à l’Idole, the scene does not, unlike its pornographic precedent, invite us in; rather, we are left shut out, confused, and a little disturbed.

Like Femme à la Sculpture Grecque, Femme à l’Idole’s possible meanings depend on its destabilizing connections to the work of other artists of the avant-garde. Rather than emulating these artists out of admiration, Picabia weaponizes the processes of quotation and allusion as critical strategies that indict his peers. I have argued that Femme à l’Idole undertakes just this type of criticism, with the two central figures—both appropriated from other sources—enacting a sapphic scene that skewers the French avant-garde’s preoccupations with the eroticism of the female body and the art of non-European cultures. Through these two paintings, Picabia embodies these preoccupations as off-putting—seamy, even exploitative—by using the embedded connotations of pornographic compositions to point to the power imbalances inherent in the French modernist tradition’s visualization of otherness.

CONCLUSION

I have argued in this thesis that it cannot suffice to simply see Picabia’s Femme à la

Sculpture Grecque Noire et Blanche or Femme à l’Idole as kitschy paintings done in poor taste.

Like Picabia’s other works, they are difficult, inflammatory, and opaque; however, I have attempted here to tease out some of the legible currents of allusion and critique that animate them. My analysis demonstrates that Picabia used Femme à la Sculpture and Femme à l’Idole reify the art-historical lineage of canonical avant-garde painters—elevating Picabia himself alongside Manet and Gauguin as key oppositional figures within that canon. At the same time, these works indict Breton and the Surrealists for their rhetoric of aesthetic, sexual, and cultural revolution, deriding their efforts as misplaced and doomed to failure. Using a combination of pornographic appropriation, visual allusion and studious bad taste, Picabia reaffirmed his intention to keep the original “Dada spirit” alive by attacking the banalities of the artistic pretensions of his peers.

Where does this reading leave us, then, with respect to the question of Picabia’s World

War II behavior? Although Femme à la Sculpture resembles commercial work that catered to

Nazi taste, my argument suggests that these similarities do not directly constitute an embrace of the Nazi aesthetic. The classicizing tendencies of the “return to order”—with which Picabia attempted to align the Surrealists—eventually found a terminus in a Nazi-endorsed erotic expressionism, typified by works such as Paul Mathias Padua’s Schlafende Diana (c. 1943; fig.

24). In Padua’s treatment, what purports to be a classical scene, with its allusion to Diana, leans fully into erotic titillation, as the title figure’s strokes the stag reclining before her. This work, which is contemporaneous with Femme à la Sculpture Grecque, employs a similar replication of non-naturalistic lighting on the nude flesh of the female figures, and a perspectival arrangement that renders the interior space of the picture relatively incoherent. These similarities parallel 49

Picabia’s appropriation of pornography as the inspiration for his central nude figure; in essence, his painting obliquely signals the “blatant sexual nature” of Nazi-sanctioned art, even as it takes on previous traditions of the female nude that Nazi artists also looked to.84 Of course, his adoption of this style might have made the works more marketable at a time when Nazi influence was near its high-water mark.85

It appears that the truth must lie somewhere in the frustrating middle ground; as with every aspect of Picabia’s practice, the painting invites a multiplicity of contradictory readings.

Thus, I contend that these paintings cannot by themselves speak for Picabia’s political sentiments regarding the Nazis or the Vichy regime; rather, I have attempted to demonstrate that the politics on view in Femme à la Sculpture Grecque and Femme à l’Idole speak mainly to the artistic politics of the Parisian avant-garde. While Picabia must have cared about the political stance of the French government during World War II, his paintings suggest that his main concerns were artistic and interpersonal.

The argument I have presented in this thesis makes clear the amount of work still to be done on Picabia’s late career. Many of these paintings, especially the others made during World

War II, have never been subjected to the kind of sustained visual and intertextual scrutiny that I have laid out here. More fundamentally, though, approaching Picabia’s entire career through the lens of the “Dada spirit” that I have argued for here recasts the artistic potential of the entire portion of Picabia’s oeuvre painted after the dissolution of Paris Dada in 1921. If we seriously

84 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.

85 Michèle Cone, “Francis Picabia’s ‘War,’” in Francis Picabia: Our Heads are Round So Our Thoughts Can Change Direction, ed. Anne Umland and Cathérine Hug (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2016), 227.

entertain the terms on which he lays out Dada as a means of deconstructive artistic inquiry— rather than simply as a visual style defined by mechanomorphism—we can begin to see him using his paintings to throw bombs at his avant-garde peers, revealing a deep entanglement with the vanguard movements of French modernism long after he left Paris.

ILLUSTRATIONS

Note: Due to copyright restrictions, the illustrations are not reproduced in the online version of this thesis. They are available in the hard copy version that is on file in the Visual Resources Center, Art Department, Katzen Art Center, American University, Washington, D.C.

Figure 1: Francis Picabia, Femme à la Sculpture Grecque Noire et Blanche, c. 1942-43

Figure 2: Francis Picabia, Femme à l’Idole, c.1941-43

Figure 3: Francis Picabia, La Jeune Fille Américaine dans L’état de Nudité, 1915

Figure 4: Francis Picabia, Fille Née Sans Mère, 1915

Figure 5: Suzanne Duchamp, Un et Une Menacé, 1916

Figure 6: Francis Picabia, Voilà Haviland, 1915

Figure 7: Man Ray, La Prière, 1930 . Figure 8: Brassaï, Nude, 1931-34

Figure 9: Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863

Figure 10: Édouard Manet, Dejéuner sur l’Herbe, 1863

Figure 11: Titian, Venus d’Urbino, 1538

Figure 12: Raphael and Marcantonio Raimondi, Judgement of Paris, c. 1510-20

Figure 13: Man Ray, Mannequin, 1938

Figure 14: Raoul Ubac, Mannequin, 1938

Figure 15: Man Ray, Noire et Blanche, 1926

Figure 16: Fernand Legér, Le Grande Dejéuner (Three Women), 1921-22

Figure 17: Mon Paris cover, 1937

Figure 18: Paul Gauguin, Rave te Hiti Aamu (The Idol), 1898

Figure 19: Paul Gauguin, The Great Buddha, 1899

Figure 20: Paul Gauguin, Tahitian Idol – The Goddess Hina, 1894-95

Figure 21: Paul Gauguin, Idole à la Coquille, 1892-93 52

Figure 22: Paul Gauguin, The Spirit of the Dead Watching (Manao Tupapau),1892

Figure 23: Venus of Willendorf, c. 28,000-25,000 BCE

Figure 24: Paul Mathias Padua, Schlafende Diana, c. 1943

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