Picabia After Dark: Milan Retrospective Recasts the Trickster as Peep Show

Francis Picabia's great-granddaughter has installed him in the dark. "Picabia. Open the Gates of Night", a major retrospective now open at Milan's Palazzo Reale, is curated by Anne Berest, who told the vernissage audience that "to know [Picabia] is… to spend the night with him." The galleries are accordingly lit like one.

The exhibition unfolds in dusky twilight, its low-lit rooms grouped by associative themes meant to simulate an evening escapade with the artist: ecstatic dance, nocturnal trysts, narcotic delirium, crepuscular epiphany. Picabia (1879–1953) was a Franco-Spanish painter and poet who moved through Impressionism, Fauvism, Orphism, Cubism, Machinism and Dada, keeping company with Marcel Duchamp, Guillaume Apollinaire, Alfred Stieglitz, Erik Satie and Gertrude Stein. He believed in perpetual artistic evolution, encoded in two oft-quoted aphorisms: "A conviction is a disease" and "If you want to have clean ideas, change them as often as you change your shirts." The walls deliver on the promise — a procession of representational compositions, geometric abstractions, mechanical diagrams and syncretic paintings built from appropriated imagery.

What does the show diagnose?

Plenty. The exhibition makes psychoanalytic forays into Picabia's subconscious and ventures diagnoses of his desires and disorders. The opening gallery is devoted to "the Spanish Night", the title of a 1922 painting and of a boyhood fixation. Picabia was born and raised in France, but his father was Spanish; childhood visits to Seville brought Holy Week processions, Flamenco dancers and the choreography of the toreador. Emphasizing his "Andalusian blood", the adult artist sublimated this self-exoticizing nostalgia into Spanish subjects. One wall carries loose pencil and watercolor studies of Sevillian women, dark hair piled under lace mantillas. Nearby, the dots of Flamenco dresses persist across an untitled 1942 illustration of ballet dancers and the late geometric canvas Symbole (1950). Archive photographs of Andalusian lattice panels and arches hang beside Salicis (1929), from the "Transparencies" series (1927–33), in which image planes interweave like double-exposed photographs.

A later gallery, "Love Parade", borrows its title from a 1917 mechanomorphic painting and pathologizes Picabia's lifelong libertinism as a response to losing his mother at seven. In their 2017 book Gabriële, Berest and her sister Claire detail his all-male upbringing — father, grandfather, uncle — and note the family nickname "les Quatre sans femme" ("the Four without a Woman"), which might also be heard as "les quatre cents femmes" ("the Four Hundred Women"), foreshadowing the vast number of lovers he courted. His sexual drive galvanized the work, from machinic sketches akin to Duchamp's bachelor machine to Woman with the Bull (1940–41), collaged from found pin-up images. The wall texts offer this libido as another reading of the "Transparencies", made when, as the didactics euphemize, Picabia "lived through multiple loves simultaneously."

Does escaping chronology work?

Not entirely. Berest writes in her curatorial statement that the show attempts to "escape chronology", favoring character study and lyric intuition over canon and movement-based ideology. The biographical reveries intrigue, but they lose their place in history: narrative threads and origin stories, including those of the "Transparencies", scatter across galleries. Rather than an overarching vision of the artist's corpus and context, a dissolution into timeless simultaneity prevails. Repeatedly the wall texts insist that "every portrait is a self portrait" — the show's real revelation, it seems, is Picabia himself.

Berest frames the exhibition for a "new generation", the museum reimagined as a carnival: sparkling lights, funhouse mirrors, and a peep show revealing some of Picabia's more lascivious drawings. It's almost as extravagant as the galas he hosted on the French Riviera in the 1930s — zoo animals staged for "Une nuit à Singapore", potted palms for "Un soir au Palm-Beach". The show addresses an audience for whom history has been superseded by the experiential and the personal. Perhaps that suits the man, whose iconoclasm ran eternal present-tense: "Everything for today, nothing for yesterday, nothing for tomorrow."

By Daniel Okafor