Francis Picabia was born François Martinez Picabia in Paris, to a Spanish father and a French mother. After initially painting in an impressionist manner, elements of fauvism and neo-impressionism as well as cubism and other forms of abstraction began to appear in his painting in 1908, by 1912 he had evolved a personal amalgam of cubism and fauvism. In 1915—which marked the beginning of Picabia’s machinist or mechanomorphic period—he and Marcel Duchamp, among others, instigated and participated in dada manifestations in New York. For the next few years, Picabia remained involved with the dadists in Zurich and Paris, but finally denounced dada in 1921 for no longer being ‘new.’ The following year, he returned to figurative art, but resumed painting in an abstract style by the end of World War II.
