Art: Back to Nature

The Armistice of 1918 gave free play to one memorable artistic movement—Dada. All perversity and insults to one school of critics, Dada seemed significant to others, who saw in its course from 1916 to 1924 a sensitive revulsion against a bad war and a bad peace.

The two Dada intellectuals known best in Manhattan were Marcel Duchamp (Nude Descending the Staircase) and his friend Francis Picabia. Picabia, born in Paris in 1878 of a French mother and a Spanish father, began exhibiting landscapes in Paris in 1894, enjoyed official successes and easy sales until 1913, when he got fed up with success. Moving first to Manhattan, then to Barcelona, finally to Paris in 1920, Picabia poured out bucketfuls of Dada, including his noted Portrait of Cézanne, Portrait of Rembrandt, Portrait of Renoir, Still Lives (all this consisting of a stuffed monkey mounted on a board).

In 1921 this most Dada of the Dadaists resigned from the group, ostensibly because Dada was beginning to develop certain rational theories which led to Surrealism. He collaborated on a ballet with Composer Erik Satie, on a brilliant movie, Entr’acte, with René Clair, and, in the true Dada spirit, accepted the rosette of the Legion of Honor. Wealthy and well advertised by Gertrude Stein, in the last few years Picabia has rested on his reputation, yachting and developing an elegantly fretful manner. Last week Paris was shocked at 60-year-old Yachtsman Picabia’s latest show.

Hung at the Galerie de Beaune, it consisted of 39 thickly painted canvases depicting sections of expensive real estate in the south of France, all done in a brilliance of color and a gush of technique which suggested the ebullitions of a talented school girl. Explained tanned, bright-eyed, wisecracking Artist Picabia, with an air of deep subtlety: “I painted them because I wanted to.” Picabia enthusiasts spoke in awed tones of the master’s daring in risking banality by a return to nature. But a growing number of critics called it reversion to type, dismissed Picabia’s middle period as theintellectual shenanigans of a brilliant amateur.