The Ironist as Nihilist

Daniel Barbiero
December 2016

Francis Picabia: The Ironist as Nihilist

Don’t work, don’t love, don’t read, think of me…There is nothing to understand, live for your pleasure, there is nothing, nothing, nothing other than the value you give yourself to everything.

-Francis Picabia, Jésus-Christ rastaquouère

Francis Picabia (1879-1953) was one of the pivotal figures of the early 20^th century avant-garde.  A painter, polemicist and provocateur, he played an important part in Dada, particularly for articulating and promulgating an attitude toward art and contemporary life that was highly influential not only within Dada, but beyond it as well. His post-Dada work has periodically been reappraised and exerted an influence on subsequent artists—most notably on artists associated with the various postmodernism of the 1980s—but it’s for Dada that Picabia will probably always be remembered. Quite apart from his impact on art, Picabia is of continuing interest for what he seems to have embodied: A thoroughgoing nihilism that appears to have been a response to certain existential facts, that is, to certain ways one is.

Picabia was born into an affluent family with Spanish aristocracy on his father’s side and the French haute bourgeoisie on his mother’s side. His mother died when he was seven, leaving his father, grandfather and uncle to raise him. He started out as something of an art prodigy, but a more impish side showed itself early on as well: While still young, he copied his father’s collection of paintings by Spanish artists, and sold the originals in order to get money for his stamp collection. By his own later account of the incident, no one noticed any difference between his copies and the originals. He was sent to study at the École des Arts Decoratifs in 1895 and first exhibited his work in 1899; after having gone through a quick succession of contemporary styles, he settled on Cubism. His cubist paintings were included at the first Cubist group show in the 1911 Salon des Indépendents and later at the 1913 Armory show in New York. He came to New York in 1913 in connection with the Armory Show, but by then he had declared that he had abandoned Cubism in favor of an abstract art expressing moods rather than representing nature.

Back in Paris in late 1913, he associated with Duchamp (whom he’d met by 1911) and Apollinaire. The three of them engaged in “demoralization, witticism and clowning,” according to a memoir written by his first wife, Gabrielle Buffet. In 1915 he stopped in New York on his way to Cuba as part of a French Army mission to buy sugar; he stayed on in New York and spent time with the group around Walter Arensberg, which included Duchamp. In 1918 he went to Switzerland for medical treatment and made contact with Tristan Tzara; he was back in Paris in March 1919, where he hosted Tzara as a house guest and associated with the Littérature group around André Breton. He broke with Dada in 1921; by 1923 he had abandoned modernism altogether, asserting that he preferred not to be influenced by any isms or anyone. He maintained relations with Breton, but by October, 1924 he attacked Breton and the nascent Surrealist movement in his magazine 391; he left Paris and moved to the Riviera in 1925. By the end of the Second World War, he had gone through the fortune that had allowed him to take material well-being for granted and was living in reduced circumstances.

“The machine is…really part of human life…perhaps the very soul”

-Picabia, quoted in The New York Tribune, 24 October 1915

Picabia’s life and career went through many vicissitudes, and his art has been met with mixed critical reception over the years. But it is the machine pictures he made from 1915 through the early 1920s for which he is best known. These pictures, which he began making during his second stay in New York, seemed to depict human relationships with a savage humor, reducing them to so many mechanical interactions: Devoid of will, moved by an outside force, put in motion to stay in motion and pursuing incommensurable interests—and all observed with a mocking, mirthless laughter. Typical of them is Machine Tournez Vite, a gouache on cardboard picture of 1916-1918. A small gear in the lower left-hand corner, labeled “femme,” locks its teeth in a mechanical embrace with the teeth of a much larger gear labeled “homme.” Once moving, the gears will turn in opposite directions—will turn away from each other. Similarly, Parade amoureuse, dated 1917, shows an elaborate mechanism of pistons, rods and cylinders that, like Machine Tournez Vite, seems to embody a satirical view of soulless erotic life in an industrial age. There is no warmth there, only the blind, impulse-driven motions of machines encountering each other.

The sensibility on display in the machine pictures would seem to include a certain emotional detachment. Recasting emotional bonds as just so many rote, unconscious motions seems to go beyond satire and toward a lack of empathy. Picabia’s life provides much anecdotal evidence for this: For example, the second time Picabia and Breton met was in January, 1920 at Picabia’s salon, which was in the bedroom of his mistress Germaine Everling’s place. Deep in conversation with Breton, Picabia waved off repeated requests that he and Breton relinquish the room to Everling, who was about to go into labor with their son Lorenzo. Picabia seemed more interested in discussing Nietzsche and Lautrémont with Breton than in the impending appearance of his son.

Significantly, the images Picabia used for the mechanomorphic pictures were copied from mass media advertisements and technical drawings. His appropriation of these images was consistent with the way he made early paintings, many of which were copied from postcards or, as in the case of a 1904 painting he did of the church in Mores, were copied from paintings by contemporary artists such as Sisley and Pissarro. It was a method he would take up repeatedly throughout his career.

“…I could not long remain indifferent to the marvelous detachment from all things of which Picabia gave us the example and that we are happy to state here.”

-André Breton, Les Pas perdus

Picabia was middle-aged at the time that Dada began to coalesce. He was born in 1879, which made him 40 in 1919-1920. The other main Dadas were much younger—in 1919 Tzara and Breton were both in their early 20s. Thus Picabia was an outlier among these outliers, an exception among these exceptions (or those who wished to be exceptions). He was older, married, wealthy—established, in his own way. For Picabia, Dada wasn’t a late adolescent episode of rebellion as it might’ve been for some of the others; on the contrary, for him it was the gesture of a middle-aged man acting consistently within a pattern established early on. It was the product of a mature sensibility: A sensibility deeply steeped in irony.

Picabia was an ironist of a particularly thoroughgoing sort. In The Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard suggests that irony “establishes a misrelation between idea and activity.” Misrelation is the product of a certain disparity or mismatch between what is said and what is meant; it entails a negation in which the ironic statement’s explicit content—what it says on the surface—is undermined by what it doesn’t say but implies. As a statement it is what it is not; in its deep structure it carries the negation of what it purports to hold and thus implies what it is not by appearing to say what is.

The irony suffusing his mechanomorphic pictures inhered in the disparity between the meticulous and precise renderings of the contraptions, and their underlying uselessness. This latter was an effect of their nonfunctionality or brokenness, or else of their misapplication. Imposing a mechanical scheme on intimate human relationships or functions was a profound bit of irony—describing one thing under the guise of another thing that misses entirely the way that thing is usually experienced. And in doing so, negating it.

Kierkegaard saw irony as a stimulant to thought and as a means of dialectically working toward a universal that would transcend the flux of the given. In that sense, irony is much like the project that posits an outcome beyond the inert facts lying immediately before us in the present. But unlike the project, which negates reality in the name of a non-existent, hypothetical state of affairs, Picabia’s irony seems simply to have negated. It doesn’t aim toward the replacement of a reality lacking in something with a new reality that somehow makes good that lack, but rather simply hollows out the given as it is and lets it collapse of its own hollowness. Nor does it serve, as negation often does, to impose a limit on something and thus help to define it, but rather attempts to put it out of play entirely. Picabia’s, in other words, was the irony of nihilism.

By reducing people to mechanical parodies of themselves and, in a sense, automating their interactions, Picabia’s machine pictures negate the possibility of relationships in any conventional sense. For Picabia, negation—the wholesale rejection of conventional values—wasn’t just a formal act empty of content. It was a basic attitude, a fundamental comportment in the world such that the latter, with its accumulation of habits, customs and meanings put there by others, would implode under the pressure of so much hollow laughter.  The world may have been the world of the anonymous “they”—as in “they say that…” or “around here this is what they do”—but by an ironic deployment of humor, Picabia effectively refuses “their” authority.

As an attitude disclosing a world, Picabia’s irony organizes the situation around him as the possibility of pure negation—the negation of convention, standards, and possibly itself. But the negation of this negation doesn’t yield a positive, only a deeper negation. When Dada began to turn its negation into something positive—a body of work, a network of like minds, a program with rules of its own—Picabia had to negate that. And in May, 1921 he very publicly negated Dada’s negation by vituperating, in an interview published in the magazine Comoedia, the people he’d formerly associated with. It’s no surprise that his break with Breton came just as the latter was beginning to lay the foundations for Surrealism, a centrally-directed movement with elaborate, and elaborately enforced, codes of behavior and thought.

Picabia’s nihilism seems to have had its roots in temperament, in a fundamental stance toward the world and realized in a history of actions. It was a stance of pure negation in that his way of being-in-the-world seems to have consisted in being-against-the-world. This made him a natural fit for Dada.

Picabia’s being-in-the-world as being-against-the-world echoes and in some ways complements the attitude that Breton called “black humor,” which was itself something of a legacy of the “umour” of Breton’s friend Jacques Vaché. Vaché, whom Breton knew during the First World War, impressed Breton with an attitude that implied the devaluation of everything conventionally held to have value, the “no” without the possibility of appeal, spoken through the rictus of a sardonic grin. Vaché defined “umour” for Breton in a letter of 29 April 1917 as “a sensation—I was going to say a SENSE—also—of the theatrical (and joyless) uselessness of everything.  When one knows.” This would seem to come close to defining Picabia’s own nihilism. And like Vaché’s “umour,” Picabia’s nihilism was essentially self-centered and without much consideration for others—to judge on the basis of the evidence concerning his treatment of friends, associates, wives and lovers.

But on top of this temperamental foundation was a rationalization Picabia derived from Nietzsche, the only author other than Lautrémont he is known to have read to any extent. His writings are full of paraphrases of Nietzsche—Marc Lowenthal, his translator, characterizes these borrowings as plagiarism—such as when he asserts that there is nothing to understand, no value except the value one derives for oneself. In other words: There is no transcendental ground on which to base belief, no metaphysical certainty to appeal to for justification. And as a consequence, no objective way of distinguishing one set of values as preferable to, or truer than, another. But this doesn’t mean that there is nothing per se. Only that what there is is not justified beyond itself; What’s left in the absence of such a ground is the necessity of making choices on a self-justifying basis. There is the gesture that has constantly to be renewed. In this sense, Picabia’s nihilism wasn’t purely negative; it involved a choice in favor of negation. To choose nothing is still to choose, and in this way to imbue it with a positive value.

“What I like is to invent, to imagine, to make myself a new man every moment”

-Picabia, Thank You, Francis!

It’s possible to see Picabia’s nihilism as a nihilism of values rejected and transvalued through the agency of an aesthetic vitalism. Such a vitalism entails the rejection of metaphysical or abstract categories underscored by notions of truth, purpose or system in favor of the impulsive, gratuitous act. There is an existential, rather than intellectual, stance implicit here in that the abstract is rejected in favor of direct intervention in a concrete situation–one whose pressures and possibilities, concretely grasped, solicit action.

For Picabia, the gratuitous act manifested itself in the pursuit of sensation. With his fast cars—he was said to have owned more than 120 of them, along with several yachts—his multiple infidelities and his living in the moment, Picabia would seem to have exemplified what Kierkegaard described as the aesthete. The aesthete—impulsive, moving from momentary sensation to momentary sensation—to find, between sensations, the nothingness of boredom. For Picabia, the aesthetic life wasn’t a stage along life’s way but a radical choice taken in the face of boredom.

In her memoir, Gabrielle Buffet reveals something about Picabia’s childhood that may have had lifelong ramifications: She said it was “saturated with solitude and boredom.” Seen in this light, Picabia’s depressive episodes, which recurred throughout his life, would appear to be indices of boredom. It may be that boredom was his Beatrice, the secret muse motivating him like a bad conscience. Or, as Kierkegaard might have put it, boredom was Picabia’s despair. Like Kierkegaard’s aesthete, Picabia’s life was consumed in the pursuit of sensation—full of fast cars, infidelities, drugs and alcohol, restlessness. Some of this restlessness would seem to have been played out in the succession of artistic styles Picabia adopted and discarded, which otherwise might have been an empty display of virtuosity by the former prodigy: One paints in a certain style simply because one can, regardless of what one sees in it. But even so, underneath the display of virtuosity would have been a deeper flight from boredom.

Boredom is a paradoxical state in that it reveals emptiness and plenitude simultaneously. To be bored is to confront a sense of empty time—time’s emptiness—to fill with nothing to distract from the fact that we move into the future inevitably and that just as inevitably we run into the limit set for us by our finitude. But boredom also reveals time as a plenitude—one we can’t fill or—and this is the same thing—one we can’t be. If anything implies that a person is nothing, relatively considered, it’s time as experienced in boredom. The sheer scale of empty time dwarfs anything human that might presume to fill it. It is this scale that gives emptiness the appearance of something massive: Through time as experienced in boredom, the world reveals itself as an endless grey monolith.

This vast grey emptiness is something that can be described as the existential characteristic of boredom, if by “existential characteristic” we mean that aspect of a situation that consists in the possible way or ways of being that it discloses to us. Boredom’s existential characteristic is to reveal possibilities within a horizon of enervation; these possibilities are likely to take the forms of indifference, lassitude, restlessness. This presents a dilemma: How to posit a way out of this massive nothingness, how to transcend enervation and reconstitute the situation as dynamic? Picabia’s choice of nihilism would appear to have been the solution to this dilemma. A solution in which the given is transcended toward a nothingness in which only sensation could mean anything.

“Buy reproductions of signed pictures”

-Picabia in 391 No. 12, March 1920

It was in the May, 1921 Comoedia article that Picabia announced his break with Dada. It would seem strange that someone opposed to everything would abandon a movement based on opposition to everything, but Picabia didn’t stop being-against, he simply changed the object of his opposition, this time directing his refusal at his old comrades. In the Comeodia article as well as in an article in Ésprit nouveau the following month, he objected to what he saw as Dada’s settling into orthodoxy and dogma—a new set of conventions he couldn’t tolerate. Eventually, Picabia’s spirit of negation extended to modern art itself. Like the rejection of Dada, the rejection of modernism was based on Picabia’s wishing to remain independent of movements and styles. If an ideology was involved in this rejection, it was the ideology of attachment to nothing, not the ideology of the return to a classical pictorial order—an ideology that had motivated many of his contemporaries, Picasso and de Chirico among them, to abandon avant-garde painting.

Picabia’s break with modernism thus represents a surface rupture lying on top of an unbroken foundation. For despite its stylistic divergence from the Dada work, Picabia’s post-Dada work—the figurative and Spanish-themed paintings, the transparencies of the late 1920s and the later images appropriated from pin-up magazines—is linked to the Dada work at a deeper level. Like the Dada work, it springs from a consistent, underlying attitude of ironic discrepancy and nihilistic detachment. This attitude never left him, even after he left Dada. In some of the work, ironic discrepancy between surface and implicit meaning is instantly legible. Quite simply, many of these pictures seem to mock their sources. The Espanogles are uglified and given to smoking cigarettes, in possible send-up of the kitschy postcards they were based on. The transparencies take allusions to classic paintings and obscure them with a jumble of extraneous and disharmonious profiles and outlines. Mimcry here runs up hard against the border of mockery.

But a deeper manifestation of Picabia’s ironic attitude can be found in his having appropriated many of these images in the first place. Through appropriation, Picabia took images indifferently from high and low culture alike and devalued them equally by treating them as just so many readymades—manufactured items there to be used and reused through the artist’s fiat. The act of appropriation, when motivated by this attitude, seems to have disavowed the sources it took from simply by virtue of its having been realized. Treating these images as readymades was just one concrete means of negating them. Picabia set out his reasoning when, in the 1920s, he had to defend his machine pictures from objections that their images had been copied from mechanical drawings and magazines. His claim was that copying an image was at bottom no different from, and possibly less insipid than, copying objects from nature. As with the readymade, the artistic value parasitic on the act of appropriation of the image lay in the choice made by the artist, not in the physical details of the work the appropriated image ended up in. As he put it in Comoedia in November 1921, “The painter makes a choice, then imitates his choice…why not simply sign this choice instead of monkeying about in front of it?”

In this context, it is tempting to see Picabia’s early copying incident as representing the first, implicit embodiment of what he would later explicitly develop as his attitude toward appropriation. Picabia’s replication of his father’s collection of Spanish paintings was an anti-forgery in that there was no attempt to pass these copies off as originals. Instead the copies—by virtue of their having been kept—were in effect declared to be of the same value as the original. On the one hand, this would entail an implicit devaluing of art in that an original was effectively declared of no more value than a copy. On the other hand, it represents a first step toward viewing an artwork as another form of readymade there to be chosen—through the appropriation of its images–and signed. It’s worth noting that this ambiguous relationship between original and copy played itself out over Picabia’s career not only as a visual artist, but as a writer. Late in life he produced a collection of poetry that was largely copied or paraphrased from Nietzsche’s The Joyful Wisdom.

“I have no ideal…my lack of scruples is an invention for myself, a subjectivity.”

-Picabia, Thank You, Francis!

In the end, Picabia’s fundamental comportment or attitude of refusal—of ironic negation—was the constant running through the early and late work, just as it was the constant running through his life. The ironic negation of convention and conformity drove the Dada pictures just as it was embodied in the transparencies of the 1920s, with their overlaid defacements of figures borrowed from Botticelli and others, the distorted Espagnoles, and the paintings copied from pin-up magazines. Ironic negation was simply Picabia’s way of entering into the world, a structure in relation to which the meaningful residue of his past projects was preserved and the open possibilities of his future actions could arise. With the post-Dada work, Picabia takes up a present in relation to a past in which the significance of the latter is reaffirmed—chosen again, but under different circumstances. The post-Dada work, like the Dada work, belongs to a historical structure in which a certain pattern of significances accumulate and are projected out onto a situation grasped in the ironic grip of detachment. On the surface this appears to be indifference—indifference to what others demand, indifference to the formal and ideological demands of the avant-garde, indifference as well to the exigencies of good taste and the return to classical plastic values that preoccupied many artists, some of them former avant-gardists themselves, during the interwar period. But underneath this apparent indifference is the unmistakable echo of a reflexive negation, the constant assertion of a “no” resounding in a self-chosen void.

Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round so Our Thoughts Can Change Direction
MoMA thru March 19, 2017

 Images courtesy of Arteidolia