Cyclope, Francis Picabia Monster Painting

This young woman may have been a stunningly voluptuous bathing beauty when Francis Picabia spied her on a beach in Cannes, before he transformed her into one of the outrageously grotesque monster paintings he created between 1924 and 1927. Marcel Duchamp had bestowed this sobriquet on several such works when he included them in an auction of Picabias paintings he organized on the artists behalf in 1926, when the latter was in need of funds to finance the lavish life style he had been pursuing since moving to Mougins on the Riviera the previous year.
Duchamp may have been thinking of an aphorism Picabia published in one of the final issues of his magazine 391 (no. 17, Paris, 10 June 1924): "I am a monster who shares his secrets with the wind" (in M. Lowenthal, ed., Francis Picabia, I am a beautiful monster: Poetry, Prose, and Provocation, Cambridge, Mass., 2007, pp. 309 and 362). Picabia was alluding to a passage in Friedrich Nietszsches The Gay Science, in which the philosopher described building a house by the sea; the artist was then similarly engaged in the construction of his own sprawling new home, Le Château de Mai, in Mougins.
During the ten-year period between 1912 and 1922, Picabia had moved from cubist-based abstraction into the dadaist territory of machine-inspired elements rife with absurdist word play and frequent sexual innuendo. He then abruptly changed course. He terminated in 1921 his affiliation with Dadaism and returned to figurative art, first in a series of costumed figures, les espagnoles.
In late 1924 Picabia also turned his back on the rising surrealist movement, despite its leader Andr Bretons eagerness to recruit him to the cause. Picabia was in his own contrarily independent manner responding to the message of le rappel à l'ordre - the call to order - a summons to stand down from the transgressive edge of avant-garde modernism, and return to the life-affirming humanist tradition in the arts, which seemed to many the only justifiable response to the carnage and destruction which Europe had suffered during the First World War.
Even before the war ended Picasso had been mining a new classical vein in his art, featuring the figure in the light of historical precedents, which he re-imagined and recast for his own purposes.
Picabia likewise conceived certain of his monster paintings in the light of famous art works he selected from the past, in some cases as objects of parody and satire. One might suspect a standing bather to be a representation of the sea-born Venus; the likely candidate for a precedent in this case is Bouguereaus La naissance de Vénuq%, a popular favorite when it was painted in 1879, formerly in the Musée du Luxembourg, and today at the Musée d'Orsay, Paris. Observe that the head of Venus in Bouguereaus painting is turned to three-quarter view; she shows her right eye only, which Picabia has grossly enlarged to create a single huge Cyclopean eye. The presence of the white towel parallels the goddesss flowing russet tresses in Bouguereaus original, and may also suggest the bubbling sea foam from which Venus is fabled to have emerged.
Now living by the sea, Picabia immersed himself in several millennia of Mediterranean myth, lore and history, as Picasso himself could not resist while on his seaside summer vacations and after resettling in the Midi following the Second World War - indeed, he eventually made his home, like Picabia, in Mougins. Picassos portentously monumental
classicism was not to Picabias taste, however, and in his Cyclope Picabia was probably taking a tongue-in-cheek swipe at Picassos bathers, perhaps making fun of the latter artists own penchant for exaggeration and deformation, in limbs and extremities enlarged to gigantic proportions. The primary source for Picabias monster imagery, however, was fundamentally of his own time and place, as he witnessed life on the Riviera firsthand. He was ready to take advantage of this new situation. In the final issue of 391 (no. 19, Paris, October 1924) he proposed Instantanism as his replacement for Dadaism. Among a litany of precepts, Picabia proclaimed: "INSTANTANISM: BELIEVES ONLY IN TODAY/ INSTANTANISM: WANTS LIBERTY FOR ALL / INSTANTANISM: BELIEVES ONLY IN LIFE/ INSTANTANISM: BELIEVES ONLY IN PERPETUAL MOTION" (in M. Lowenthal, ed., op. cit., p . 313). This ethos was well-suited to Picabias new life style, and his approach to art as well, on the Côte d'Azur. Although he later derided this environment as having given in to the absolute reign of ersatz (quoted in S. Cochran, Duchamp Man Ray Picabia, exhibition catalogue, Tate Modern, London, 2008, p. 146), he reveled while painting his monsters in the shallow hedonism and empty materialism of the place. He drew his subjects from the burgeoning population of nouveaux riches and their opportunistic hangers-on, relishing, unmasking and then mercilessly skewering their hypocrisies and pretensions, while having admitted, "What I love least in others is myself" (quoted in ibid., p. 309).
Picabia and Picasso - les deux Picas, as the dealer Lonce Rosenberg called them - had since the war become the twin cutting edges of the most extreme possibilities in modern art, setting up a rivalry such as that Picasso had kept up, on and off, with Matisse. Les deux Picas crossed paths in Mougins during the summer of 1925, while Picasso was vacationing in nearby Golfe-Juan. No longer in Paris, away from the dada-surrealist war zone, John Richardson has written, "they turned out to have more in common than either might have thought" (A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932", New York, 2007, p. 290).
In March 1925, following the Mi-Carme Bacchanalia in Nice, Picabia wrote to a friend, "I am doing a lot of work in a whirlwind of baccara, a whirlwind of legs, a whirlwind of jazz. I am doing mid-Lenten paintings of lovers, confetti paintings in which the sheen of cheap silk is duplicated by Ripolin" (quoted in ibid., p. 291). "Fifty years before the advent of Pop, Picabia has used the energy and tawdriness of the Carnival scene - tarnished finery, caked makeup, candy floss hair - to administer a succession of shocks to conventional art lovers", Richardson has written. "According to Gabrielle [the artists wife], Picabia thought he had gone too far in these Monster paintings. Much as he loved to shock, he may have feared that modernists would look askance at a style and technique so perfectly attuned to the sleazy underbelly of the Riviera. He was going to destroy them, Gabrielle said, but I begged him to
do nothing of the sort since they manifested
some of the most astonishing aspects of his
personality" (ibid., p. 292).
In 1925 Picabia and Picasso each painted a version of a kiss - Picabia first, some months before Picasso. Both versions share a frenzied vitality, an irrepressible monster quality which defies Classicism,
Cubism or any other previous discipline of figuration. These paintings demonstrate that each painter was making his own way, from an impetus they shared to push the boundaries of painting to the furthest conceivable limit, toward a personal revelation of surrealism, while standing alone and apart from the madding crowd of their colleagues back in Paris.  

Francis Picabia (22 January 1879 – 30 November 1953) was a French avant-garde painter, poet and typographist. After experimenting with Impressionism and Pointillism, Picabia became associated with Cubism. His highly abstract planar compositions were colourful and rich in contrasts. He was one of the early major figures of the Dada movement in the United States and in France. He was later briefly associated with Surrealism, but would soon turn his back on the art establishment.

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