Céret (Pyrénées-Orientales). The annual summer exhibition at the charming Musée de Céret aims to show the role played by Catalonia in the work of Francis Picabia (1879-1953) between the years 1910 and 1920. One should not expect a scholarly journey for researchers in art history, but rather an introduction to a discussed artist and an immersion in artistic Barcelona around the years of the First World War. From this point of view, it is rather successful and in fact the exhibition has obtained the label “exhibition of national interest”.
Picabia does not leave you indifferent. Thus Michael Gibson, the art critic of theInternational Herald Tribunedid not hesitate to describe it as “ pretty awful artist » (“a pretty bad artist”) in his commentary on Picabia’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris in 2002. His figurative vein – Spanish (see ill.) and Monsters from the mid-1920s until the paintings based on photographs of the 1940s – has long baffled some critics with his paintings based on images in bad taste. We do not see these works in Céret nor even his important production of impressionist paintings with which he began his career.
Jean-Roch Dumont Saint Priest, the director of the museum and curator of the exhibition (with the help of Gwendoline Corthier-Hardoin) preferred to start with the “machinist turn”, when Picabia, influenced by Duchamp, his wife Gabriële Buffet and his stays in New York, abandoned the colorful abstract forms to which he had turned, in favor of a vocabulary of engines, pistons, cogs and other technical diagrams. It must also be said that the happy, wealthy reveler that Picabia was loved cars; he apparently owned one hundred and twenty-seven of them.
Birth of “391”
He gives free rein to his mechanomorphic inventions in the magazine 391 which he founded in January 1917, during one of his stays in Barcelona. The route reserves an entire section for this periodical, managing to overcome the pitfall of displaying archives in glass tables with drawings published in the magazine, displayed on the walls. While it is difficult to attribute any influence to the Barcelona atmosphere on the creation of this publication, the model of which is clearly the New York review 291 of Stieglitz, on the other hand, the community of artists in exile in the Catalan capital during the war offered him a reservoir of authors. This review of Dadaist spirit (his first contact with Tristan Tzara was later) is also a support for his schoolboy provocations. “Where is modern painting going? To the toilet! » can we read on one of the exposed pages, above the signature EP whose initials are strangely reminiscent of those of Francis Picabia.
The other reason which governs the creation of the magazine and which the exhibition suggests by devoting a section to it is the role played by the Barcelona gallery Josep Dalmau which provides it with material facilities. The gallery which organized the first major exhibition on Cubism in Spain also and above all offers a platform to Kees van Dongen, Albert Gleizes, Marie Laurencin, Serge Charchoune and Francis Picabia. A period photograph clearly reflects the almost edge-to-edge hanging method of the paintings and drawings exhibited by the gallery owner. Picabia is less well represented in this section, because as the curator explains: “We were unable to present more works from the Picabia exhibition at Dalmau in 1922, most of which were kept in the United States. »
The artists just mentioned – to which we should add Juliette Roche, Madame Albert Gleizes, whose works are worthy of interest – are very present in Céret. “Studying the Cubist and Dadaist effervescence in Catalonia around Picabia helped us to underline the strength and singularity of key figures in the history of art in Céret including Sacharoff, Laurencin, Cravan and Tzara among others, which was motivating. Presenting the Dalmau archives in France for the first time and retracing the itineraries of Van Dongen, Grünhoff, Picasso and Gontcharova also fascinated us”explains the curator. Picabia, a pretext for exhibiting other artists or a way of offering a counterpoint to a work that is not always exciting? Still, by opening itself largely to artists exiled in Barcelona during the war, the exhibition tells a little-known story, well summarized, in one of the sections. It is in this sense that we can characterize it as an exhibition of ambiance or atmosphere that materializes in photographs of these exiles on the beach or a poster of the famous boxing fight (today we would speak of a happening) between the poet Arthur Cravan and Jack Johnson, the first black boxer to become world champion.
Francis Picabia (1879-1953), Spanishcirca 1926-1927, pencil, watercolor and gouache on paper, 53 x 46 cm, private collection.
© Picabia Committee Archives
The Spanish imprint
The atmosphere becomes frankly Spanish in the last section entitled “The Hispanic Influence”. She strives to show how much these artists drew on local imagery (a room chart speaks of “Hispanic folklore”). A Picasso on loan from the Picasso Museum in Barcelona, Woman with mantilla (Fatma), throne in the middle of the room, surrounded by dancers painted by Marie Laurencin or Albert Gleizes and bullfighters represented by Picabia. The latter occupies a special place in this section with around fifteen works including his famous portraits of a Spanish woman, and (only) two paintings from the series of Transparencies (among the most popular on the art market) in which the painter superimposes several figures, most often taken from books. It is also on one of the two paintings in the series, a beautiful oil, gouache and watercolor from 1925-1927 on loan from the Thyssen Museum that the tour ends, allowing the visitor to leave with a flattering image of Picabia’s work. The exhibition will spend the winter in Cannes, in a slightly different version as it is enriched with his work from the Cannes years. This intelligent pooling made it possible to reduce production costs by around €240,000.
