Francis Picabia, 1915

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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)

Inscription

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

Provenance

Georgia O'Keeffe; gift to NGA, 1949.

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.

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