FRANCIS PICABIA — Galerie 1900-2000 Exhibition Catalogue, 2011

Published for a Francis Picabia exhibition at Galerie 1900-2000, Paris, March–April 2011, with a text by Arnauld Pierre. Softcover, 43 pages, 17.5 × 23 cm; colour and black-and-white reproductions; text in French.

The catalogue is devoted principally to Picabia as a draftsman, an aspect of his practice that sits slightly apart from the better-known paintings. The exhibition moved across different periods rather than trying to stabilise Picabia into one style: mechanical drawings such as Papa / Maman from 1919 appear alongside the stripped-back Jeune fille of 1920 and later works. Arnauld Pierre's accompanying text considers drawing as one of the places where Picabia's continual movement between ideas can be seen most directly.

That instability is central to Picabia. Impressionism, machines, Dada, abstraction, figurative painting and apparently casual drawing repeatedly replace one another. What once made his work difficult to organise historically is precisely what makes it increasingly contemporary: no single style is granted ownership of the artist.

The publisher is significant. Galerie 1900-2000 was founded by Marcel Fleiss in Paris in 1981 after Man Ray had encouraged him to open a gallery. It became an important specialist in Dada, Surrealism and adjacent avant-gardes — particularly Duchamp, Man Ray and Picabia — while extending its programme into Fluxus, Conceptual art and contemporary practice. The gallery remains active and records more than one hundred catalogues as part of its publishing history.

Within that history, this is less a generic retrospective catalogue than a dealer-produced document arising from a gallery with a long working relationship to Picabia's material. A useful object because it catches Picabia through one of the quieter channels of his practice: works on paper, reproduced and redistributed by a gallery whose own history is embedded in the afterlife of the avant-garde.

Condition: Good. Light handling, surface rubbing and minor marks to the wrappers, with slight edge and corner wear. Internally complete and generally clean.

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