A Retrospective Introduces Francis Picabia to a New Generation—with Funhouse Mirrors and a Peep Show

While midday crowds throng under a brilliant sky on Milan’s Piazza del Duomo, darkness gathers behind the windows of the nearby Palazzo Reale, where the vernissage for a major Francis Picabia retrospective has just begun. “Picabia. Open the Gates of Night” is curated by the artist’s great-granddaughter Anne Berest, who explained in her opening remarks that “to know [Picabia] is… to spend the night with him.” As if in a dream, the exhibition unfurls in a dusky twilight, low-lit galleries gathering works under associative themes that simulate an evening escapade with the playboy artist, evoking everything from ecstatic dance and nocturnal trysts to narcotic delirium and crepuscular epiphany.

Picabia (1879–1953) is one of the elusive figures of modern art, a Franco-Spanish painter and poet who moved freely between Impressionism, Fauvism, Orphism, Cubism, Machinism, and Dada, counting among his friends luminaries like Marcel Duchamp, Guillaume Apollinaire, Alfred Stieglitz, Erik Satie, and Gertrude Stein. Always pursuing a visual language for the forms that blossomed within his brain, Picabia believed in perpetual artistic evolution, an idea encoded in two of his oft-quoted aphorisms: “A conviction is a disease,” and, “If you want to have clean ideas, change them as often as you change your shirts.” In the exhibition, this heterodox ethos is manifest in the sheer stylistic variety of Picabia’s work, the walls a procession of representational compositions, geometric abstractions, mechanical diagrams, and syncretic paintings full of appropriated imagery.

“Picabia. Open the Gates of Night” makes psychoanalytic forays into the artist’s subconscious and daringly diagnoses his desires and disorders. The stage is set with a boyhood fixation—a gallery dedicated to “the Spanish Night,” also the title of a 1922 painting. Though Picabia was born and raised in France, his father was a Spaniard; during childhood visits to Seville, he witnessed Holy Week processionals, the rhythmic movements of Flamenco dancers, and the vital choreographies of the toreador. Emphasizing his “Andalusian blood,” the adult Picabia sublimated this self-exoticizing nostalgia into compositions on Spanish subjects. At the Palazzo Reale, an entire wall is punctuated by Picabia’s loose pencil and watercolor studies of the severe faces of Sevillian women, dark tresses piled high under lace mantillas. Across the room, a series of works showcases the persistence of dots—a common pattern on Flamenco dresses—across Picabia’s figural and abstract works, such as an untitled 1942 illustration of ballet dancers and his late geometric canvas Symbole (1950). Elsewhere in the room, comparison is drawn between photographs from the Picabia Family Archive of Andalusian architecture, with its lattice panels and arches, and the painted superpositions in Salicis, a 1929 work from his “Transparencies” series (1927–33) in which image planes interweave and interrupt one another as if in double-exposed photographs.

A later gallery, “Love Parade” (borrowing its title from a 1917 mechanomorphic painting), pathologizes Picabia’s lifelong libertinism as a response to the tragic loss of his mother at the age of seven. In their 2017 book Gabriële, the show’s curator and her sister Claire detail his all-male adolescence—he was raised by father, grandfather, and uncle—and observe that his family’s resulting nickname “les Quatre sans femme” (“the Four without a Woman”), might also be heard as “les quatre cents femmes” (“the Four Hundred Women”),” perhaps foreshadowing the vast number of lovers he courted over his lifetime.

Regardless of its roots, Picabia’s sexual drive was a galvanizing force in his work, from the machinic sketches à la Duchamp’s bachelor machine to erotic paintings such as Woman with the Bull (1940–41), which was collaged from found images of pin-up models. Picabia’s unchecked libido offers another interpretation for his “Transparencies,” which emerged at a time when, as the exhibition didactics euphemistically state, Picabia “lived through multiple loves simultaneously.”

Repeatedly, the wall texts underscore the idea that “every portrait is a self portrait.” There is a sense that the exhibition’s most significant revelation is neither synesthetic experiment nor vanguardist provocation but, merely and monumentally, Picabia himself. “Picabia. Open the Gates of Night” attempts to “escape chronology,” as Berest writes in her curatorial statement, setting aside the artistic canon and movement-based ideology in favor of character-study and lyric intuition. Despite their intrigue, these biographical reveries lose their place in history, splitting narrative threads and origin stories for bodies of work—including the “Transparencies” series—across the galleries. Rather than suggesting an overarching vision of the artist’s corpus and context, a dissolution into timeless simultaneity prevails.

Berest frames the exhibition as one for a “new generation,” the museum reimagined as a carnival or party. Within the decadent interiors of the Palazzo Reale, the exhibition operates theatrically as its own scintillating setpiece, the installation design completed by sparkling lights, funhouse mirrors, and a peep show that reveals some of Picabia’s more lascivious drawings. It’s almost as extravagant as the galas that Picabia hosted in the 1930s on the French Riviera, for which he orchestrated outrageous mise-en-scènes—zoo animals secured for “Une nuit à Singapore,” a grove of palms potted and arranged for “Un soir au Palm-Beach.” The exhibition addresses an audience for whom history has been superseded by the experiential, the embodied, and the personal. Perhaps this is as Picabia himself would have it. Another of his aphorisms, after all, celebrates the unbridled iconoclasm of an eternal present-tense: “Everything for today, nothing for yesterday, nothing for tomorrow.”