Francis Picabia Artwork valuations, appraisals and auction estimates

Francis Picabia (1879 - 1953) was born François Marie Martinez Picabia in Paris in 1879. From 1895 to 1897 he attended the École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and began exhibiting paintings at the Salon d'Automne and the Salon des Indépendants of 1903 after starting to paint impressionistically in the winter of 1902-03. Read the full biography

Francis Picabia Biography

Francis Picabia (1879 - 1953) was born François Marie Martinez Picabia in Paris in 1879. From 1895 to 1897 he attended the École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and began exhibiting paintings at the Salon d'Automne and the Salon des Indépendants of 1903 after starting to paint impressionistically in the winter of 1902-03. The Galerie Haussmann in Paris held his first solo exhibition in 1905. His paintings began to incorporate elements of Cubism, Neo-Impressionism, and Fauvism starting in 1908, and in 1912 he created a unique synthesis of the two movements. From this time until the early 1920s, Picabia works primarily in an abstract style.

In 1911 and 1912, Picabia became friends with Guillaume Apollinaire and Marcel Duchamp and was involved in the Puteaux group. He visited New York at the 1913 Armory Exhibition and frequented avant-garde circles while there. His machinist or mechanomorph period began in 1915, when he and Duchamp, among others, organized and participated in Dada demonstrations in New York. Picabia spent 1916 and 1917 living in Barcelona and continued to collaborate with the Dadaists in Zurich and Paris for a few more years, stirring controversy at the Salon d'Automne, but in 1921 he finally condemned Dada for no longer being "new". He moved out of Paris the following year returning to figurative work.

In 1925 Picabia moved to Mougins and returned to Paris only after the end of the Second World War. Here he resumes writing poetry and abstract painting. Considered a key figure of postmodernism, a retrospective of his work was held in 1975 at the Grand Palais in Paris. Furthermore, his work has been widely acquired by modern art museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York (which hosted a comprehensive survey of his work in 2016) and many others.