Artist: Francis Picabia

Michael Werner Gallery, New York presents Francis Picabia: Femmes, an exhibition of painting by the French modern master Francis Picabia (b. 1879 in Paris, d. 1953 in Paris). Starting in the 1920s and extending into the 1950s, the exhibition charts the last three decades of Picabia’s career through the singular, classic, and favored subject matter of women.

Picabia famously wrote, “In order to have clean ideas, change them as often as your shirt.” Throughout his career, Picabia shifted rapidly between styles. Founding and then rejecting almost every major artistic movement of the early 20th century, paintings of women remained at the core of Picabia’s practice. Due to the long historic, academic tradition of painting the female body, women were the perfect subject matter for Picabia’s endless efforts to upend, subvert, and reinterpret modern painting.

Francis Picabia: Femmes includes masterpieces from Picabia’s many experimentations in painting, including his frenzied “Monster” series, revolutionary “Transparencies”, and proto-Pop portraits of pin-up models and actresses. Picabia’s work defies our conventional understanding of modern art. Extremely influential to succeeding generations of artists, Picabia’s oeuvre, on view in this exhibition of paintings of women, provides an alternative, more open, narrative of 20th century art.