MoMA's Francis Picabia monographic exhibit brings together 200 works

PanARMENIAN.Net - The Museum of Modern Art’s Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round so Our Thoughts Can Change Direction, on view November 21, 2016–March 19, 2017, is the first major exhibition of the artist’s work in the US in nearly half a century, and the first ever to chart the full range of Picabia’s audacious, irreverent, and profoundly influential career, Art Daily said.

“Our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction” is an aphorism coined by Picabia in 1922, and it aptly encapsulates the nonlinear, circular character of his artistic practice. This exhibition presents approximately 200 works in an array of mediums in order to advance understanding of Picabia’s unruly genius and its vital place within the history of modern art. Francis Picabia is organized by MoMA and the Kunsthaus Zürich. The curators are Anne Umland, The Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Curator of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA; and Cathérine Hug, Curator at the Kunsthaus Zürich; with Talia Kwartler, Curatorial Assistant, MoMA. Prior to its presentation in New York, the exhibition was on view at the Kunsthaus Zürich.

Among the great modern artists, Francis Picabia (French, 1879–1953) remains one of the most elusive; he vigorously avoided any one singular style or medium. He is also an artist with a strong connection to New York, where he first achieved fame as a leader of the European avantgarde. Though best known as one of the luminaries of the Dada movement, his career ranged widely—and wildly—from Impressionist landscapes to abstraction, from paintings of machines to photo-based nudes, and from performance and film to poetry and publishing. Picabia’s contributions to a diverse range of artistic mediums make him especially relevant for contemporary artists, and his career as a whole challenges familiar narratives of modernism.

Francis Picabia assembles key selections and bodies of work, ranging in date from the first decade of the 20th century through the early 1950s. Picabia’s widely varied work as a painter is represented, along with his activities as a publisher and contributor to vanguard journals, and his forays into screenwriting and theater. The core of the exhibition comprises some 125 paintings, along with approximately 45 key works on paper, one film, a selection of printed matter, and sound recordings of selected poems and writings.