Francis Picabia
1915
Artist, American, 1864 - 1946
Artwork overview
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Medium
platinum print
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Credit Line
-
Dimensions
sheet (trimmed to image): 24.8 x 19.6 cm (9 3/4 x 7 11/16 in.)
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Accession
1949.3.364
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Stieglitz Estate Number
32E
Part of Stieglitz Key Set Online Edition
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Key Set Number
402
Alfred Stieglitz
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Artwork history & notes
Provenance
Georgia O'Keeffe; gift to NGA, 1949.
Associated Names
Exhibition History
2002
Alfred Stieglitz: Known and Unknown, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, June 2–September 2, 2002; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, October 6, 2002–January 5, 2003
2009
Nexus New York: Latin/American Artists in the Modern Metropolis, El Museo del Barrio, New York, 2009–2010
Bibliography
2002
Greenough, Sarah. Alfred Stieglitz: The Key Set: The Alfred Stieglitz Collection of Photographs. Washington, 2002: vol. 1, cat. 402.
2009
Cullen, Deborah, ed. Nexus New York: Latin/American Artists in the Modern Metropolis. El Museo del Barrio, New York, 2009–2010.
Inscriptions
by Alfred Stieglitz, on mount, center left verso, in graphite: Picabia 1915 / by Stieglitz
by Georgia O'Keeffe, on mount, lower left verso, in graphite: 32 E
by later hand, on mount, lower right verso, in graphite: 7-1944-360; lower right verso: 7-1944-360
Wikidata ID
Q64034876
Scholarly Remarks and Key Set Data
Remarks
Stieglitz and Picabia first met when the flamboyant French painter and his wife Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia came to the United States in 1913 for the Armory Show. Declaring that their “wonderful intelligence made both of them a constant source of pleasure,” Stieglitz exhibited Picabia’s most recent studies of New York (Stieglitz to Arthur B. Carles, 11 April 1913, YCAL). Picabia’s return trip in 1915 was both more productive and more complex. As in his painting Comic Wedlock, Picabia became fascinated with biomorphic and mechanistic imagery. He further explored these ideas in a series of innovative abstract portraits published in the avant-garde periodical 291, where he depicted Stieglitz as a broken camera. Thereafter their friendship cooled, although Stieglitz showed his work again in 1928, at the Intimate Gallery.
Behind Picabia is his painting Comic Wedlock, 1914 (The Museum of Modern Art, New York), shown at 291 in “Exhibition of Recent Paintings,—Never Before Exhibited Any Where—by Francis Picabia, of New York,” held from 12 to 26 January 1915.
Lifetime Exhibitions
A print from the same negative—perhaps a photograph from the Gallery’s collection—appeared in the following exhibition(s) during Alfred Stieglitz’s lifetime:
1944, Philadelphia (no. 184, as Francis Picabia, 1915)