Beaux monstres

A hilarious prankster, a flamboyant amoralist, a good painter, a bad painter… Everything fits, nothing is enough. Picabia remains an enigma. The one who speaks best of him is still himself: “an artist of all kinds”, “a rack of artists”, “a beautiful monster whose face hides his face”, “what I like most in others is myself”… Put end to end, his aphorisms could paint an elusive portrait.

After taking an active part in the Dadaist movement, Picabia explored ever more unexpected pictorial avenues. The series Les Monstres (1924-26) was followed, around 1927, by the Transparences. They were not taken seriously. Coming from him…

These works are now attracting growing interest; convulsive, esoteric, these palimpsest canvases are nonetheless decipherable, luminous. Projective matrices,
the Transparencies reveal the coherence of a beautiful monster. Delphine Florence, art historian and lecturer, offers you an introduction to this little commented corpus.