Paris is an unbudgeable want
“All conviction is an illness,” Francis Picabia, Ecrits, 1913-1920
1.
You’re back in Paris, living just off Place Vendome in the house you were born in. Not on the main floors, up under the roof, in the top-floor mansard apartment where your grandfather, the president of the Société française de photographie and a close friend of Nadar, Niépce and the Lumière brothers, kept a darkroom almost 100 years before.
None of the charges against you stuck, so you’re free, but broke, and still with Olga, your second wife, whom you hired as your son’s nanny two decades before. To get her French papers – she’s German-Swiss, which ruffled feathers at the start of the war – you married her the same day the Nazis invaded Paris.
You’ve lived together for more than a decade, first moored off the coast of Cannes in Horizon II, the yacht you gave her, and then, when you lost that, bouncing – and being bounced – from borrowed apartment to borrowed apartment in villages up and down the coast.
It was an ok life. Your work appeared in Vichy-regime publications. You had a show in Cannes with Bonnard and Matisse. You pumped out “pocket paintings” and one-a-day kitschy pinups reminiscent of Wilhelm Hempfing paintings – like the nude blonde Hitler bought – based on images you copied from 1930s porn mags. Decades later, the critic Peter Schjeldahl will describe these works as “so awful that you can’t take your eyes off them.” They will become a new orthodoxy: countless postmodern painters will build careers copying them. You would have found this endlessly amusing. “Our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction.” You said this a long time ago. Yours is still spinning. But you’ve always kept it – kept your head, as the saying goes. But that hasn’t stopped the art world from ringing it like a bell.
2.
Now might be as good a time as any to say the things that haven’t yet been said. Not just because we never dared say them, nor because the timing wasn’t right – when is the timing ever right? – but because we thought there was no need yet to say these things. That we’d always have another opportunity. Another chance. And this might be precisely that – that other chance. Perhaps the last one.
So that’s the first thing. But before we go further:
The Romans went on about this. So did Spengler.
Yes, it’s a coup. Backed by varying elements, including, it seems, popular demand.
Ship of state? The new captain and crew couldn’t navigate a dinghy across a swimming pool.
He owns two “Renoirs”. They’re both fakes, but no one dares tell him. One he keeps on Trump Force One.
He is taking over the Kennedy Centre. He is establishing a task force to plan 250th anniversary commemorations. He is building a National Garden of American Heroes.
3.
You blew through your parents and uncle’s money on the usual playboy pursuits. You were a “rastaquouère”, a flashy, suspect, South American rake – your fortune came from your other grandfather’s sugar plantation in Cuba – of low social extraction and vulgar tastes. You used the term for the title of a book you wrote back in your dada days – pushed ever forwards towards the latest avant-garde by your first wife, you wore out styles — impressionism, cezannism, fauvism, cubism, futurism, dadaism, realism, abstraction – “like a baby wears out shoes” (Dave Hickey). You said it better: “Si vous voulez avoir les idées propres changez-en comme de chemises.” (“If you want to have clean ideas, change them as often as your shirt.”)
Your first successes were Pissarro and Sisley-like landscapes that even Pissarro and Sisley admired. Until they learned you copied them from postcards.
“Talent doesn't exist,” you wearily wrote way back in 1920 when you left Dada. “Masterpieces are just documents, truth is the pivot on the scale. Everything is boring, no? Falling leaves are boring, new leaves are boring, heat is boring, cold is boring. Grandfather clocks that don't chime are boring, those that do chime are boring. Having a phone is boring, not having a phone is boring. People who die are boring, just as are those who don't! Look how badly the world is put together, why doesn't our brain have the force of our desires? But all that matters very little, paintings in museums are masterpiece-fossils. A man is called tasteful because he shares the taste of others; for you, life is a guitar on which one plucks only the same tune forever.”
You wrote the book I mentioned – Jesus Christ rastaquouèr – that same year. Dedicated to “toutes les jeunes filles.” Also on the dedication page: “La pudeur se cache derrière notre sexe" (“Modesty hides behind our sex”) and “J’ai connu un roi atteint de démence précoce dont la folie consistait à se croire roi” (“I knew a king suffering from early-onset dementia whose madness consisted in believing himself to be king”). Your first wife wrote the Introduction: “The Religion phase of humanity is ending – the Art phase as well. The work of art has not lost its reason for existing, it has lost its value… New games, new rules… When will we break the habit of explaining everything?… One must not believe that the absence of principles removes the support of life. The explanation is always bland, always false.”
From your first chapter: “The good vegetables, the strawberry plant, the heliotrope, etc.… These are the excesses of love and the nothingness of Jesus-Christ-Rastaquouèr… LET'S GO TO THE DESERT OF TASTE: Taste, something good, good wines, speeches, success, the immense grotesque of enthusiasm for nationality, for honour – I give my word of honour only to lie – are for me sensations of disgust accompanied by nausea. A suckling pig is more sympathetic to me than a member of the Institute, and bitterness comes to my stomach when contemplating turkeys, peacocks, and geese that make up society's elite. Famous sense of duty, boiled by good education! There are people who live in perpetual indigestion from it, and it makes their breath stink because it can only be digested by a few domestic cadavers, in bronze or marble, from our public squares: Jesus Christ – Stradivarius, Napoleon the shit disturber, Spinoza the soporific, Nietzsche the onanist, Lautréamont the sodomite. Politics finishes dissecting lightness – hot air balloon of your so-called intelligences, your brains are like bells for camels and crocodiles, the noise of your phrases is on you like the bells that cows wear around their necks and that ring when they descend from the mountain of suggestions.… DO NOT WORK, DO NOT LOVE, DO NOT READ, THINK OF ME: I have found a new laughter that gives me free passage. There is nothing to understand, live for your pleasure, it is nothing, nothing, nothing but the value you yourself will give to everything.”
4.
Give me just five more minutes of your time. Gérard de Nerval, a hundred years before, around the time your grandfather co-invented lithophotography, had a lobster, which he walked on a leash under the lime trees of Palais Royal. He was said to believe that it held the secrets of the sea in its claws. Salvador Dali had an ocelot named Babou, a gift from the exiled President of Colombia. This was after La Violencia ("The Violence"), during the first of the four National Front coalitions in Colombia, in the early days of JFK’s "Decade of Development" and disastrous Alliance for Progress program. This was six months before USAID was even created!
You have to keep track of these things for yourself, no one will do it for you. Yes, I’ve seen the photos of Dali ascending the stairs of the Bastille metro with a giant anteater at the end of a leash. Apparently, this has something to do with André Breton, who they called the great anteater. Breton’s politics are interesting, especially the Haitian voodoo period. Dali’s anteater is sniffing a substance on the sidewalk. A milky substance. There are people crowded around. It was staged. Everything about Dali was staged. He was a loudmouth and a fascist. Friend of Franco. Devoted works to Mussolini and Hitler.
He borrowed another anteater from the Bronx Zoo a few years later. On the set of the Dick Cavett Show, he threw it into the lap of Lillian Gish. Gish was an intimate of Ike, Nixon, and Reagan and an active member of the America First Committee. She will not be among the American heroes in Trump’s Garden. Nor will Cavett’s other guest, Satchel Paige.
5.
You owned many yachts and more than 120 cars. For the last five years, however, you’ve only had a bicycle, and you’ve had to live off the sale of your paintings for the first time in your life. Before, painting for you – like your poems, films, magazines, set designs and typography – was a distraction, a means to avoid idleness. You never really had a soul: Your first wife suggested that you had successfully eliminated the verb to be and created a “vacuum with a pneumatic machine, a suction pump that renews red blood cells!” You battled against anxiety and depression. You were often reduced to a “form of nothingness”. From a letter to Gertrude Stein, who you met through your first wife: “I find it impossible to work. Every day, I feel more depressed: I hardly have the heart to get up in the morning. If we get out of all this destruction alive, how delighted I would be to sit beside you on your beautiful terrace! There are moments when I wonder if we shall ever see each other again.” The belle terrasse in the letter was at 27 rue de Fleurus in Paris, where Stein and her wife Alice hosted parties. You longed to return to this world.
You did a painting of Stein in 1933 and another in 1937. In the first, from memory, you dressed her in a toga. She didn’t care for it. Soon after, in “Stanzas in Meditation” and again in a catalogue for your show, she wrote:
When I first knew him I said
Which was it that I did not say I said.
I said what I said which was not in him.
Now who wishes that said is said.
The second portrait looks like it is from a photograph. She didn’t care for it either. In the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, she called you “brilliant and erratic”. You annoyed her with your “incessantness” and what she called the “vulgarity” of your “delayed adolescence”, but: “oddly enough in this last year they have gotten to be very fond of each other… She is now convinced that although he has in a sense not a painter's gift he has an idea that has been and will be of immense value to all time. She calls him the Leonardo da Vinci of the movement. And it is true, he understands and invents everything.”
She organized a show for you in Chicago. Only a couple of pieces sold, so you destroyed the rest. Not destroyed so much as painted over. Some in 1938. One three years from now, but re-dated “1925”.
6.
Time is unstuck. The French occultist and essayist Jacques Auguste Simon Collin de Planc tells us that Babou was not an ocelot from Colombia but one of the fantastic elves of Scotland: “He exercised dominion over the stormy winds of autumn by sitting at night in the boughs of linden trees, breaking branches. In Scotland, when one saw a branch broken, twisted, or split in a certain way, they would say, with a mixture of reverence and apprehension: ‘That is Babou's branch,’ and none would dare lay a hand upon it.”
Breton wrote a poem about it.
7.
You’re still on friendly terms with your first wife, who never left Paris and was in the same Resistance cell as Samuel Beckett. Your daughter ran the Paris-based underground network, which passed on secret documents and hid Allied parachutists and escaped POWs. Your eldest daughter, Marie-Laure, was arrested and sent to a camp.
You kept your distance from the heroic. Yours was a higher calling. “My painting is increasingly the image of my life and of life itself, but a life that does not want and cannot look at the world in its greed and monstrosity... Everything that has been moral in art is dead, fortunately! It's the only service the surrounding cataclysm has rendered.”
You had no time for children; very little is known about yours. Your son will take his life two years from now. You will die in this house in seven. Between then and now, you will paint abstracts, most of them inspired by prehistoric art and Catalan Romanesque angels.
On a holiday to Cassis, you’ll start painting dots. They will amuse you. They will make you feel like a “kid at the seashore”.
Responding to an interviewer’s question, you’ll shout: “Ah, listen! Let’s stop talking about painting! Let's rather listen to a song by Mayol... Viens poupoule!” A hit song from your childhood.
8.
Get your coat. It’s time. Leave your phone.
Francis Picabia, “Éternel recommencement / Eternal Beginning”, 18 January – 12 March 2025, Hauser & Wirth, 26 bis rue François 1er, Paris 75008