Before establishing himself as a pioneering member of the dada movement during and after World War I, Picabia experimented with various forms of modernist painting. Procession, Seville belongs to a group of works from 1912 in which the artist demonstrates a sophisticated and highly idiosyncratic assimilation of recent developments in cubism and futurism.[1] Fragmented planes, shallow space, and an allover pattern of flickering lights and darks are all associated with the analytic cubism of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque; the quasi-abstract evocation of bodies in motion is an interest Picabia shared with Italian futurist painters such as Gino Severini and Umberto Boccioni, who were just beginning to exhibit in Paris.
The paintings in this series, which includes several large-scale works, were produced between June and September. All of the pictures have descriptive titles that are often boldly inscribed on the painting itself; many of these, including Procession, Seville, relate to scenes of peasant and religious life that Picabia had witnessed on his honeymoon in Spain in 1909. Procession, Seville purports to represent a hillside religious procession, with nuns in black habits and white headgear. Figures coalesce into a mass in the center of the canvas, making their way up the rugged terrain, with blue sky showing in the upper-left and upper-right corners of the composition. The restricted palette, dominated by blacks, whites, and grays, derives in principle from analytic cubism, but the acidic passages of blue and orange (presumably the nuns' faces) are peculiar to Picabia's work. Picabia's paintings from 1912 were often produced in formal and thematic sequences or groups, including several canvases devoted to images of the dance. The subject of the present painting is probably related to two other works from this period, Procession and Processional Music, both now lost. Despite Picabia's titles, the paintings of 1912 and 1913 were considered by various observers of the period as virtually abstract.
Picabia participated in a number of exhibitions of avant-garde painting during the prewar period. Procession, Seville was shown in the Salon de la section d'or, an important early cubist exhibition that was held at the Galerie de la BoÎtie in Paris in October 1912. It was on this occasion that the poet-critic Guillaume Apollinaire attempted to codify recent developments in cubist and futurist painting: Picabia—along with Robert Delaunay and Marcel Duchamp—was an "Orphic" cubist devoted to "pure painting," an abstract idiom that was analogous to music.[2] This comparison between painting and music, which was a common one during the prewar period, was frequently made by Picabia himself in interviews and statements about his work in 1913.[3] Procession, Seville was also one of four works by Picabia that appeared in the landmark New York Armory exhibition of 1913,[4] which introduced an American audience to the most advanced developments of the time in modernist European and American art. The painting has an important provenance: it was originally acquired by Marcel Duchamp, Picabia's close friend since 1911; Duchamp sold the painting at a large auction of Picabia's works in his collection in 1926, at which time Procession, Seville was acquired by André Breton.
(Text by Jeffrey Weiss, published in the National Gallery of Art exhibition catalogue, Art for the Nation, 2000)
Notes
1. Concerning Procession, Seville in the context of Picabia's prewar work, see William Camfield, Francis Picabia: His Art, Life and Times (Princeton, 1979), 32—33.
2. Camfield 1979, 35-36.
3. See Maria Lluïsa Borràs, Picabia (New York, 1985), 98.
4. Camfield 1979, 43-45.