One of Francis Picabia’s first art crimes was to produce Impressionist paintings that were based on photographs—and make money doing it—a perfect start to the scattershot anti-retinal agenda that Dada would exploit and his compatriot Marcel Duchamp would elevate to doctrine. None of the now-canonical artists who were working in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century had clean hands when it comes to messing around with art, especially painting, but Picabia’s work time and time again demonstrates that he never needed a coconspirator because he was his own gang. “FRANCIS PICABIA N’EST RIEN,” bellows from a handbill he produced in 1921, but the scope of this current exhibition reinforces what the 2016–17 Kunsthaus Zürich/MoMA retrospective asserted with thoroughness and vitality: then, now, later, Picabia was, is, will be everything.
