Francis Picabia

  In November of 1922, Francis Picabia and André Breton drove with their wives from Paris to Barcelona for Picabia’s exhibition at the Dalmau Gallery. Breton wrote the catalogue of the show and before its opening he delivered his historic lecture on modern art. He spoke about the Dada movement, which began in Zurich in 1916, and in which both he and Picabia were major players. The show was a flop, both financially and critically, and it marked the beginning of a difficult period for Picabia, the playboy, humorist, and artist of incessant output and diverse styles, now considered an avatar of postmodernist pop art. This period came to be known as “L’Epoque floue” — the “Hazy Epoque” that marked both the dissolution of the Dada movement and the formulation of Surrealism. In the early 1920s the covers of a number of issues of Littérature, a critical review under Breton’s…