Mike Kelley. Orphic Mattress. 1989.

© Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts/

Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
 The Body after Cubism*

GEORGE BAKER

Church bells, the sound of waves, the still calm of the

sea, moonlight, sunsets, storms, are all so much
shampooing for the blind penis; our phallus should
have eyes, with their help we could believe for a
moment that we have seen love up close.
—Francis Picabia, Jésus-Christ rastaquouère, 19201
Dulces moriens reminiscitur Argos: I want to begin with a memory, but one far
from my central subject in space and time. I want to begin with a Los Angeles
memory, an exhibition by the artist Mike Kelley held at the Rosamund Felsen
Gallery in 1989. There, Kelley showed one of his lesser-known formats: a series of
artworks in the form of mattress covers, hugging cushions laid directly on the
floor. These were works that reflected on the rhetoric around the origin and birth
of abstraction at a time, in the late 1980s, that was itself witnessing a resurgence of
so-called abstract art—in the pastiched or simulated form known as Neo-Geo. 2

* This essay was occasioned by an invitation to speak at the fifth annual Anne d’Harnoncourt
Symposium, organized by Christine Poggi and Anna Vallye at the University of Pennsylvania in the fall of
2013, around Vallye’s exhibition Léger: Modern Art and the Metropolis at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In
addition to Poggi and Vallye, I want to thank Maria Gough for her response after the lecture’s presenta-
tion, and Walead Beshty for discussion and the loan of several books. A central fragment of what follows
has been published in the catalogue for the current Picabia retrospective organized by the Kunsthaus
Zurich and the Museum of Modern Art; for supporting my effort to expand and publish the essay in full
here, I wish to thank the curators Anne Umland and Cathérine Hug; I am grateful as well to David Frankel
in the MoMA Publications Department, and to Alexander Provan for editorial improvements.
1. Reprinted in Francis Picabia, I Am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose, and Provocation, trans. Marc
Lowenthal (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), p. 231.
2. I have discussed Kelley’s under-known mattress works in “Mike Kelley: Sublevel,” in Mike Kelley,
ed. Eva Meyer-Hermann and Lisa Gabrielle Mark (New York: Prestel, 2013). Kelley notoriously read the
reductivist forms of Neo-Geo in relation to the history of the “base” or excessive forms of caricature (“The
historical referencing of reductivist paradigms,” he wrote, “here is only a legitimizing facade, concealing
what is, in effect, a secret caricature—an image of low intent masquerading in heroic garb”), a position laid
out in the essay “Foul Perfection: Thoughts on Caricature,” Artforum (January 1989); reprinted in Kelley,
Foul Perfection: Essays and Criticism, ed. John C. Welchman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), pp. 20–38.

OCTOBER 157, Summer 2016, pp. 34–62. © 2016 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
36 OCTOBER

With some of the mattress works evoking representations of stained glass, redolent
with the spiritual rhetoric that surrounded abstract art, Kelley’s crash-pad abstrac-
tions included a nod to the French painting baptized by Guillaume Apollinaire as
“Orphism,” the poet’s mythological and musical label for the formal developments
that emerged out of Cubism in the work of artists such as Marcel Duchamp and
Francis Picabia, Fernand Léger and Robert Delaunay.
An affair of swirling color planes, Kelley’s Orphic Mattress (1989) pointed to a
connection between modernist painting and a more recent childhood world of
happy, Technicolor bedsheets. But in its recollection of a squat or a crash-pad,
Kelley’s floor-bound abstraction-as-memory also evoked a countercultural or subcul-
tural world where the body and the work of art would never be allowed to part, where
eroticism’s claim upon the aesthetic—in the counterculture—would be first and fore-
most, and where abstraction would now be retooled as a place for dreams, perhaps
for fucking. In Kelley’s mattress works, the body and abstraction were imagined as
pressed tight to each other, laid one atop the other, a fantasy of the body attached to
or directly absorbed into the visual field and material ground of abstraction itself.
In what follows, I want to capitalize on Kelley’s art-historical insight: that in
Orphic Cubism, in the immediately post-Cubist moment that witnessed the emer-
gence of Picabia’s project as an avant-garde painter, there was an intense cou-
pling—as opposed to dissolution—of the terms of modernism and the body, of
modernist painting and corporeality.

In a well-known photograph of the painter in his studio, Picabia poses in

shirtsleeves, surrounded by a chaos of discarded brushes, cigarettes, and used-up
tubes of paint. The portrait must date to just before the onset of Picabia’s Cubism
in 1912, as we stare at the landscapes and nature studies that characterize the
artist’s Fauvist period in 1911. But there are also bodies. High above the painter’s
head hangs a canvas that seems to be a study of female nudes in the spirit of
Matisse, or perhaps Cézanne in the mode of his bathers or the visual display of a
work like The Eternal Feminine (c. 1877).3 Strangely, the canvas has been rotated
and rested on its long side to echo one of the languid, reclining bathers depicted
in the work; or perhaps, more interestingly, to defamiliarize and estrange their
bodies, now mechanically and physically (literally) disoriented.4
3. Scholarship has identified this painting as Printemps (1911), otherwise undocumented since
being exhibited at the 1911 Salon des Indépendants, when it was described by a critic as “a canvas
where M. Picabia evokes, in fantastic colors, spring symbolized by four nymphs in diverse attitudes and
fatigued poses.” See William Camfield, Francis Picabia: His Art, Life and Times (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1979), p. 22. Camfield observes that the work was included in the same room where
Gleizes, Metzinger, Léger, Delaunay, and Le Fauconnier organized one of the first public exhibitions
of Cubism. The portrait photograph of Picabia is dated July 9, 1911, in the retrospective catalogue
Francis Picabia: Singulier idéal (Paris: Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, 2002), p. 433.
4. The rotated canvas is a cliché of modernist abstraction, one of whose origin stories arises
in Kandinsky’s memory of seeing one of his own paintings leaning on its side at twilight and being
The Body after Cubism 37

Picabia in the studio, 1911.

The defamiliarization of the body would become a central stake of Picabia’s

painting in the year to come, as he settled into Cubism. At first he painted simple
bodies, figure studies like the Spanish-flavored and darkening eclipse that is Jeune
fille (Young Girl) of 1912—a lesson, it seems, in making literal the pictorial conven-
tion of profil perdu and the loss to painting of visual plenitude that Cubism’s ques-
tioning of painterly illusionism entailed.5 In the same dark spirit, but much more
advanced along the Cubist pathway, is Picabia’s Figure triste (Sad Figure) (1912).6
The work’s title directly testifies to the artist’s dialogue with his new friend Marcel
Duchamp; to the centrality of the body in Duchamp’s conception of Cubism; and
to his figures always launched into motion, as in Nude Descending a Staircase (1912)

captivated by its unrecognizable forms. See Kandinsky, “Reminiscences [1913],” in Kandinsky:

Complete Writings on Art, ed. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1982), pp. 369–
70; cited in Leah Dickerman, “Inventing Abstraction,” in Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925, ed. Leah
Dickerman (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2013), p. 18.
5. Given my larger set of claims, it is important to note that Jeune fille seems deeply reminiscent
of Picasso’s own investigation of the conventions of profil perdu, especially in his Rose Period work of
1906 and in canvases like Two Nudes of that year. I explore the relation to Picasso’s work and Cubism in
later iterations of the “jeune fille” subject in Picabia’s Dada project in my book The Artwork Caught by the
Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007).
6. William Camfield positions this painting in the aftermath of Picabia’s key Cubist canvas of
summer 1912, Danses à la source [I] (Dances at the Spring [I]), and characterizes the work further: “Other
experiences called for different palettes, as in Figure triste, where a chord of blue, black and gray corre-
sponds to the quality of ‘sadness’ struck in the title. In comparison to Danses à la source [I], the relation
of Figure triste to Cubism is already more tenuous, and its handling of figuration and abstraction quite
unsettled.” Camfield, Francis Picabia: His Art, Life and Times, p. 32.
38 OCTOBER

and its precursor, Jeune homme triste dans un train (Sad Young Man on a Train)
(1911–12), which Picabia evokes here.7 But any motion in Picabia’s canvas derives
from the trajectory of circulating, nonfigural planes, and from the intense, even
excessive, volumetric and space-creating effect of the extreme high contrast
between abutting light and dark forms. For Picabia’s still-legible figure seems
securely seated, resting head on hand in an obvious homage to another “sad” fig-
ure, Albrecht Dürer’s female allegory in Melencolia I (1514).
It may press too far to see the notorious geometric form represented in
Dürer’s print, the irregular polyhedron that the allegorical figure seems to contem-
plate, as central to Picabia’s reflections, though such excessive polyhedrons and
trapezoids do become the basis for the formal language of Picabia’s Cubism by the
summer of 1912. Witness the heads of the “dancers” in Danses à la source [I] (Dances
at the Spring [I]) (1912), the key early work in a series that would move Picabia quick-
ly toward abstraction, or what Apollinaire paradoxi-
cally dubbed “pure” painting, in the months follow-
ing June of that fateful year.8 Extremes of light and
dark within a palette gravitating around hybrid
flesh tones in pink and yellow and red; tortured,
conflicting, and wayward geometries, as opposed to
Cubism’s privileging, by this moment, of the regu-
larized grid: These are now married to a body
imagined to be in motion, a body caught up in the
rhythms of dance.
Coupled with the dance metaphor, other
intimations of motion overtake Picabia’s first
major Cubist statement, but the spirit of Futurism
seems nowhere in evidence. Like a memory of this
trope’s place at the origin of modernism, harking
back at least to Courbet, Picabia’s painting aligns Albrecht Dürer.
the endless flow of water (the “spring” or “source” Melencolia I. 1514.
of the title) with the erotics of the female nude,
and both of these with the capacities and materials of the medium of painting.9
And Picabia ensures that the entire occasion for the painterly scene is wedded to a
modernist narrative of displacement, a story of travel to the south, to the light, to
the sun. Variously remembered—by Apollinaire—as inspired by a “natural plastic
emotion experienced near Naples,” or—by Picabia’s first wife, Gabrielle Buffet-
7. While I will posit a specific logic to Picabia’s Cubism, such claims should be compared
throughout to the essential reading of Duchamp’s Cubist project by David Joselit, “Mensuration en
abyme: Marcel Duchamp’s Cubism,” in Infinite Regress (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), pp. 9–70.
8. On the dialogue between Apollinaire and Picabia in 1912, see the introduction to Baker, The
Artwork Caught by the Tail, pp. 1–29.
9. It strikes me that Printemps, the canvas of nudes in the landscape rotated on its side in the
1911 portrait photograph of Picabia, might represent a first attempt at the subject broached in the
1912 Cubist and abstract series. The subject of dance at this moment “belonged” to Matisse, of course,
and Picabia’s Fauvist work evinces an intense dialogue with his art, to which Picabia will return, quite
emphatically, in the 1920s.
 Picabia. Figure Triste. 1912.
© 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York / ADAGP, Paris.
Picabia. Danses à la source [I]. 1912.
© 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York / ADAGP, Paris.
The Body after Cubism 41

Picabia—as a scene of a young dancing shepherdess witnessed during the couple’s

1909 honeymoon in Spain, Danses à la source [I] followed a series of earlier Cubist
canvases with distinctly Italian or Spanish subjects: Port of Naples (1912) or La
Procession, Séville (The Procession, Seville) (1912) or Tarentelle (Tarantella) (1912), with
its evocation of the eponymous southern-Italian folk dance.10
In the years to come, such references to Italy and Spain, the Mediterranean and
southern Europe, would be central to the anti-modernist reaction to Cubism called
the “return to order,” the resurgence of figuration and classicism in postwar French
art. To a large extent, the question of the body and Cubism has always been posed as
a question of the return of the body, the lapse back into figuration and realism after
Cubism’s modernist annihilations. The body and figuration are precisely what
Cubism had to break down. But Picabia’s early Cubist works remind us that, long
before such developments, these Mediterranean tropes could provide access to the
body for the painter, underlining a place for the carnal within modernism. Indeed,
for Picabia, modernist abstraction would never represent a negation of figuration or
the bodily; the opposition of abstraction and figuration was not the point. Rather, far
from conceptions of style and closer to the dynamics of modernization itself, Picabia’s
early work forces us to ponder how abstraction must be understood as something that
happens to the body, a process through which the body must pass. And, vice versa, we
could also claim: There is no abstraction within modernism that can be uncoupled
from the corporeal, no matter the many misguided fantasies of this possibility.11
In this light, Buffet-Picabia’s insistence that Picabia’s 1912 paintings look
back, like a memory, to 1909 and to Spain strikes one as symptomatic. If art history
has so far been fixated on a biographical and empirical reading of such discursive
elements of Picabia’s history, Buffet-Picabia’s claim cries out instead to be
unpacked on the level of form. For Picabia’s turn to Cubism in 1912 does seem to
look back to 1909—but on the level of a dialogue between paintings, an exacerba-
tion of forms. Indeed, his excessive play with light and shadow, the chaotic array of
contradictory planes and oblique, lozenge-shaped compositions, with bodies con-
tinuously twisted into landscape-like forms, finds its closest parallel within Cubism
proper in the paintings that Picasso made in Horta de Ebro, Spain, in the summer

10. On Tarentelle, see William A. Camfield, Beverley Calté, Candace Clements, and Arnauld
Pierre, eds., Francis Picabia: Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 1, 1898–1914 (Brussels: Mercatorfonds, 2015), pp.
332–33. On the split in the origin story for the Danses à la source canvases and La Source (The Spring), see
Camfield, Francis Picabia: His Art, Life and Times, p. 32. Apollinaire’s statement that the works represent
Picabia’s memory of Italy appears in Guillaume Apollinaire, Les Peintres cubistes (Paris: E. Figuière,
1913), p. 71. Buffet’s insistence that she and Picabia had not traveled to Italy, and that the paintings
instead looked back to time spent in 1909 in Spain, can be found in Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, “Picabia:
L’inventeur,” L’Oeil 18 (June 1956), p. 33. Michael Taylor points out that Picabia told a journalist in
New York in 1913 that he recalled “stopping at a country place” in Italy, where there was “a natural
spring of crystalline water in a lovely garden.” See Henry Tyrell, “Oh, You High Art! Advance Guard of
the Post-Impressionists Has Reached New York, One of Their Leaders, M. Picabia Explains How He
Puts His Soul on Canvas,” World Magazine, February 9, 1913; reprinted in Maria Lluïsa Borràs, Picabia,
trans. Kenneth Lyons (New York: Rizzoli, 1985), p. 106. See also Michael Taylor, “Francis Picabia:
Abstraction and Sincerity,” in Dickerman, Inventing Abstraction, pp. 110–12.
11. My title and these thoughts are meant to echo, self-consciously, Devin Fore’s recent book
Realism after Modernism: The Rehumanization of Art and Literature (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).
42 OCTOBER

of 1909 (or in his landscape-like por-

trait heads of Fernande Olivier of
that same year).
Whether or not he was intimate-
ly familiar with the Horta de Ebro
canvases, Picabia’s most direct refer-
ence in 1912 to Spain, La Procession,
Séville, evinces the closest formal par-
allels to Picasso’s works of 1909.12 For
the painting rhymes especially with
the mounting, mountain-like forms,
with the fusion of wayward trapezoids
and arcing ellipses, of a work like
Picasso’s Reservoir, Horta de Ebro
(1909). And such formal parallels
seem like an insistence on Picabia’s
part, like he is clinging to a specific Picabia. La Procession,
Séville. 1912. © 2016
moment in Cubism—a modality of
Artists Rights Society (ARS),
Cubism—that must be taken to task, New York / ADAGP, Paris.
and made his own.
What might this mean? Rosalind Krauss has claimed that Picasso’s Horta de
Ebro landscapes testify to an intense contradiction within Cubism’s project, as the
artist dedicates himself to the breakdown of painterly illusionism only to find him-
self torn between the demands of vision and those of the body. In Maisons à Horta
(Houses on the Hill, Horta de Ebro), for example, Picasso flattens form and aligns
aspects of the represented space with the dictates of the canvas and the vertical
visual field; but he also allows deep canyons of painterly space to bore into the pic-
torial structure, yawning pockets of residual figuration that seem in excess of even
the old illusionistic possibilities, and thus seem to split the image discordantly
between extremes of abstraction and illusionism, vision and touch, verticality and
horizontality, diaphanous flatness and vertiginous depth. As Krauss puts it, this is a
depth “that occurs when the ground gives way below one’s feet, a depth that is a
function of touch, of the carnal extension of one’s body.”13
12. The formal testimony of Picabia’s and Picasso’s paintings speaks for itself; it is not necessary
to “prove” that Picabia had seen the Horta de Ebro works to explore the reading of his Cubism that I
am opening here. The most plausible scenario for Picabia to have known the Horta de Ebro works by
1912 would be through having seen some of them at Kahnweiler’s gallery, where certain canvases were
sent by spring 1910, though not publicly exhibited (other canvases from the series could have been
seen at Vollard’s); or through the photographs of his stock of Picasso’s paintings that Kahnweiler pro-
duced and that circulated widely among artists at this time, especially the Puteaux Cubists, with whom
Duchamp and Picabia were associated. I thank Anne Umland, Luise Mahler, and Rachel Silveri of the
Museum of Modern Art for correspondence and speculation on this issue.
13. Rosalind Krauss, “The Motivation of the Sign,” in Picasso and Braque: A Symposium, ed. Lynn
Zelevansky (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1992), p. 266. Crucial to the direction of Krauss’s read-
ing of the physical and the carnal in Picasso’s Cubism is its eventual tragic “loss” after Horta de Ebro,
the “withdrawal of touch from the field of the visual,” especially in his work of 1910–1911. See Krauss,
p. 271. On the Horta paintings, see also Leo Steinberg, “Resisting Cézanne: Picasso’s ‘Three Women,’”
Art in America 66, no. 6 (November–December 1978), pp. 115–32.
The Body after Cubism 43

If anything, the planes and spa-

tial markers in La Procession, Séville—
the constant, thickening corrugation
of the rollicking field; the abrupt
shifting between surface and depth;
the knifing but precarious, oblique
planes plunging down and in all
directions as if repeatedly into a
black void; the painting’s imagina-
tion of a flow of bodies converted
into spatiality itself, into a landscape
or a world (the inspiration for this
painting was always claimed by the
painter to be a religious procession
of nuns in their black habits)—if any-
thing, Picabia’s forms intensify the
contradictory and carnal effects of
Picasso’s by-then-surpassed, even
abandoned Cubist work. The hetero-
geneity and excessive physical dimen-
sion of the language of Cubism at
Horta seem to be precisely what
Picabia needed to exploit. And when
the body as a representation disap-
pears from Picabia’s painting with
the sudden abstraction of the second
version of his Cubist subject, Danses à
la source [II] (Dances at the Spring [II]),
and its sister canvas, La Source (The
Spring) (1912), the spatial markers
only intensify, the effects of indis-
criminate depth and void mount and
reach for every corner of the canvas.
Top: Pablo Picasso. Reservoir, Contours reassert themselves not as
Horta de Ebro. 1909.
Bottom: Picasso. Maisons à drawn lines or legible figurative
Horta. 1909. © 2016 Estate of forms but in the sheer alignment of
Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights the edges of fragmented planes, with
Society (ARS), New York. these ghostly patterns and their
absent lines drilling dark holes into
the allover visual field. And the inescapable carnal dimension of such visual dynam-
ics comes to be redoubled, as the two paintings erupt in a fleshy, corporeal riot of
pink, orange, pale tan, and red tones, a bodily stew simultaneously erotic and excre-
mental in implication, the inflamed vividness riven by ashen shades of every conceiv-
able type of brown, gray, and black.14
14. Leah Dickerman reads Picabia’s abstract works of 1912 as directly “invoking” the Cubism of
Picasso, but also travestying Picasso with their “crude” paint handling and “pulsing eroticism.” See
44 OCTOBER

Rather than a parody of Picasso and Cubism, then, as some scholars have
recently read these works, Picabia’s anachronistic return to Horta de Ebro and
turn to Picasso seem instead to legitimize this: The body disappears in Picabia’s
Cubism only to exacerbate the physical model of his painting.15 The loss of carnal-
ity to Cubist and then modernist painting that has been the trajectory of our cru-
cial narratives of this moment—this logic, for Picabia, will be reversed. And it will
be reversed in the language of Cubism, and through its means.

In another well-known photograph of Picabia, the artist no longer appears in

the studio. In fact, he hardly appears at all. Shielded by dark goggles, covered in a
dull leather riding coat, he sits behind the wheel of an automobile, traveling most
definitely en grande vitesse (at great speed), as Man Ray inscribed the photograph.16
The car seems to buck along the narrow dirt course, kicking up small clouds
of dust in its wake, the spokes of its wheels still somehow visible. And if its rear
wheels fade into the geometric certainty we call perspective, the car’s front wheels
stretch impossibly into deformed ellipses, as they follow the forward lurch of the
entire automobile into indistinctness. The headlights melt into a nebulous blur,
betrayed only by a far wheel runner sharpened into a threatening spike, its back-
ground status suddenly twisted into foreground, with what should read as reces-
sion now a prow. Like an image in a fun-house mirror, the entire car tilts, sways,
and wobbles, its deformations playing tricks on the eye, its forward rush past the
static camera suddenly transformed into another illusion entirely. Angled as they
are, the wheels on the near side of the car seem to rise unmistakably upward, lift-
ing off from the ground, vertiginously rolling the automobile not forward but over

Dickerman, “Inventing Abstraction,” p. 17. Michael Taylor attests to a further bodily exacerbation, and
I borrow and extend his reading of La Source as excremental in its palette. See Taylor, “Francis Picabia:
Abstraction and Sincerity,” pp. 110–12.
15. There is a larger project to be opened up here on the precise manner in which Picabia jetti-
sons (transforms) the body to achieve abstraction by the summer of 1912. It has been known since the
conservation work on the canvas The Spring that occurred upon its rediscovery in the 1970s that the work
contains a prior underpainting (now visible from the back of the canvas) of three standing nude female
bodies, from which Picabia retained some shapes and rhythms but proceeded to obliterate all recogniz-
able trace in the final form of the “abstract” work. To understand Picabia’s painterly process here more
fully would be to comprehend the nature of what “abstraction” meant for the painter—as a conceptual
and painterly process, and how it emerged in a literal move onward from the figure or body itself. Again, I
thank Anne Umland and Talia Kwartler at the Museum of Modern Art for their conversation on this
point, and for sharing the museum’s conservation research on this painting with me.
16. The photograph was a gift of sorts, a portrait meant to serve as a frontispiece for Picabia’s
post-Dada novel, Caravansérail, a book that remained unpublished in the artist’s lifetime. Luc-Henri
Mercié, in his presentation preceding the first publication of the text of Caravansérail [1924] (Paris:
Pierre Belfond, 1974), pp. 7–19, documents the original purpose of the Man Ray photograph and cites
a letter from André Breton to Picabia dismissing the novel and his recent activities. The photograph
would receive its first publication, however, in La Révolution Surréaliste 2 (January 15, 1925), p. 30.
Top: Picabia. Danses à la source [II]. 1912.
Bottom: Picabia. La Source. 1912.
© 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York / ADAGP, Paris.
46 OCTOBER

and into the space of the photograph.

Reeling into motion, the photograph
freezes nothing, and one imagines
Picabia’s automobile disappearing in the
blink of an eye, but also careening wild-
ly, catastrophically, onto its side.
It is a portrait of the artist as a race-
car driver. But Man Ray’s photograph
also embodies an anti-portrait in a way,
resistant to its seeming Futurist inspira-
tion, dedicated to a celebration of all
that can never be fixed in a static repre- Man Ray. Francis Picabia en
sentation. La vie, Picabia would claim, grande vitesse. 1924. © Man
Ray Trust / Artists Rights Society
breaks all such bounds—life, by which (ARS), NY / ADAGP, Paris 2016.
he meant movement, mobility, and
speed, all things escaping the confines of objecthood, of static image, of rational
sense.17 Modernity is often narrated as a story of rationalization, an incessant ana-
lytical disintegration of all qualities into measurable quantities. But less often
explored are the dialectical consequences of modernization, those fleeting
moments when the very tempo of quantification, its sheer accumulation, translates
into qualitative alteration. There exists a modernity of intensities (“Dada is our
intensity,” as Tristan Tzara would say): a modernity that produces not better,
stronger, and faster, but too much, too fast, too often. Picabia’s photograph
belongs here. It embraces a modernity not of rationalization but of excess.
“I would love to paint like I drive an automobile, at 130 kilometers an hour
without running over anyone—in Paris, of course!”18 This is Picabia in 1921,
launching his bad jokes but also voicing a credo that had been his for almost a
decade. Modern painting would be allegorized as racing; it should be perpetually
in motion, the embodied equivalent of high speed. Here is Picabia in 1913:
I paint a picture of an automobile race. Do you see the cars rushing
madly ahead in my picture of that race? No! You see but a mass of
color, of objects that, to you, are strange, maybe weird. But if you are
used to, if you are capable of, accepting impressions, from my picture
of an automobile race you will be able to achieve the same suggestion
of wild desire for speed, the excitement of that hundred mile an hour
rapidity, that the driver himself feels. I can throw colors, the idea of
movement on a canvas that will make you feel and appreciate that.19
17. This is a constant trope in Picabia’s writings; see, for example, the essay “L’Art,” Littérature 13
(May 1920), pp. 5–6; reprinted in Picabia, Écrits, ed. Olivier Revault d’Allonnes, vol. 1, 1913–1920
(Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1975), p. 227.
18. Francis Picabia, “Fumigations,” The Little Review (Autumn 1921), pp. 12–14; reprinted in
Picabia, Écrits, ed. Olivier Revault d’Allonnes and Dominique Bouissou, vol. 2, 1921–1953 et posthumes
(Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1978), p. 34.
19. Francis Picabia, “Picabia, Art Rebel, Here to Teach New Movement,” The New York Times,
February 16, 1913. The translation into French appears in Picabia, Écrits, vol. 1, p. 21, where a series
The Body after Cubism 47

Art historians have stressed the Futurist strains in Picabia’s early proclamations on
painting, but the states of excess invoked in this passage might as well be borrowed
directly from Baudelaire. Baudelairean modernity, with all of its subjective
avatars—intoxication, vertigo, oblivion, diversion, distraction, physical pleasure—
formed the world, the constant tropes, of Picabia’s own modernity.20 The experi-
ence of the modern occasions an incessant triggering of subjective excess; moder-
nity can only be portrayed as a perpetual-motion machine.
It would be this impulse in Picabia’s work, a radical one that she calls a
“release into motion,” that attracted a film theorist like Annette Michelson to
Picabia. In her account, Picabia’s work, from its earliest avant-garde moments,
becomes riven by an overwhelming desire, as it repeatedly elaborates various
strategies of what Michelson comes to call “temporalization.” 21 Struggling to
emerge from within his work as a painter, this impulse toward duration, toward
temporal extension and thus actual motion, can be found in the early Orphic can-
vases, especially all those just discussed that have their source in a repeated cele-
bration of the movements of dance. The impulse can also be found in the canvases
that memorialize another voyage, another displacement: Picabia’s travel in 1913
between Paris and New York on the ocean liner La Lorraine and the time he spent
in the company of the dancer (and film star) Stacia Napierkowska. 22 These
include Danseuse étoile sur un transatlantique (Star Dancer on a Transatlantic Liner)
(1913), Danseuse étoile et son école de danse (Star Dancer and Her School of Dance)
(1913), Udnie (jeune fille américaine; danse) (Udnie [Young American Girl; Dance])
(1913), and Edtaonisl (ecclésiastique) (Edtaonisl [Ecclesiastic]) (1913).
Subsequently, we witness Picabia’s proliferation of machine drawings called
mechanomorphs, so many mad inventions that solicit a potential “release into move-
ment,” as the drawings call for the viewer to imagine the depicted contraptions not
frozen, as represented, but literally in operation and thus in motion. One thinks of
Voilà Elle (1915), Picabia’s Duchamp-inspired version of a “bachelor machine,” and
thus a token of Picabia’s allegiance to the preeminent aesthetic model of perpetual
motion within the historical avant-garde. But one thinks as well of Picabia’s
mechanomorphic form itself, his line, as in the many drawings that illustrate

of “Baudelairean” words are chosen for the original English text (“l’exaltation,” “l’ivresse,” “la frénésie de
la vitesse”).
20. Picabia’s affinity for Baudelaire was pointed out long ago in Michel Sanouillet, Francis Picabia
et “391,” vol. 2 (Paris: Le Terrain Vague, 1966), p. 50 and p. 79, where Sanouillet makes a compelling
comparison of Baudelaire’s “Le Poème du haschisch” and Picabia’s “Metal,” famously written while he
was under the effect of drugs. The dependence of Picabia’s aesthetic on Baudelaire is the subject of
extensive analysis in Carole Boulbès’s “Les écrits esthétiques de Francis Picabia, entre révolution et
réaction, 1907–1953” (Ph.D. diss., Université Panthéon-Sorbonne, 1993).
21. Annette Michelson, “Painting. Instantaneism. Cinema. America. Ballet. Illumination.
Apollinaire,” in Francis Picabia: Maquinas y Españolas (Valencia: IVAM Centre Julio González; Barcelona:
Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 1995), pp. 192–95.
22. See Camfield, Francis Picabia: His Art, Life and Times, pp. 49–50. Art historians have until
recently overlooked the fact that the dancer Napierkowska was a crucial early cinema star. For more on
this, see the excellent new book by Jennifer Wild, The Parisian Avant-Garde in the Age of Cinema, 1900–
1923 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), pp. 62–101.
48 OCTOBER

his ---Poèmes et dessins de la fille née sans mère (Poems and Drawings by the Girl Born without a
Mother) of 1918, illustrations that can be seen as “trembling,” as Michelson puts it, “on
the edge of animation.”23 Then, too, there is Picabia’s insistent allegiance to a “musi-
calist” aesthetic, an inheritance from Symbolism that attempts to substitute the mobil-
ity of music for the characteristically static effects of painting, as seen in Chanson nègre
[I] (Negro Song [I]) (1913) and Chanson nègre [II] (Negro Song [II]) (1913).24 And, last,
this musicalist aesthetic, in Picabia’s work and writing, would constantly be allego-
rized as racing. From the beginning, for Picabia, painting would not stand still.
Of course, Picabia eventually made the transition to cinema, advancing from
the representational movement of his paintings to the literal mobility of film. It
was the literalness of this move that attracted Michelson, permitting her reading
back onto Picabia’s earlier painterly aesthetic, as she examines Entr’acte, the film
that Picabia produced with René Clair in 1924.25 But it would be a cinema config-
ured in absolute contiguity with the aesthetic subjectivity that he had for a long
time been exploring, a formal model completely opposed to the “cognitive” pro-
ject of early avant-garde film and dedicated, as Michelson points out, to a “desir-
ing” one.26 Owing to cinema’s inherent, fundamental mobility, Picabia could only
envisage the medium as a mode, a purveyor, of sheer excess. “Cinema should give
us vertigo,” Picabia exclaims, “it should be a sort of artificial paradise, a promoter
of intense sensations surpassing the ‘looping the loop’ of airplanes and the plea-
sures of opium.” Cinema—says Picabia—should be a source of “distraction.”27
In Entr’acte, such sensorial intensity comes to be represented in the film’s
notorious point-of-view roller-coaster scenes, its car-chase footage, its endless cele-
bration of ballet dancing and leaping and jumping, its narrative motivation in a
hilarious chase after a corpse on the loose. By this moment of 1924, Picabia could
list the aristocratic pleasures, the brute physical sensations, in which his work
would attempt to participate: He sought “a joy comparable to a beautiful night of

23. Michelson, “Painting. Instantaneism. Cinema. America. Ballet. Illumination. Apollinaire,” p.

193. The title of Picabia’s book contains ambiguity in the French that is lost in English. While usually
translated as Poems and Drawings of the Girl Born Without a Mother, with the “of” in the title embodying a
more stable or traditional subject-object and authorial position, the more radical proposal of using “by”
was first proposed in Caroline A. Jones, “The Sex of the Machine: Mechanomorphic Art, New Women,
and Francis Picabia’s Neurasthenic Cure,” in Picturing Science, Producing Art, ed. Caroline A. Jones and
Peter Galison (New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 145–80.
24. See Camfield et al., Francis Picabia: Catalogue Raisonné, pp. 351–52.
25. For a full reading of the project of the film, see the chapter “Intermission: Dada Cinema,” in
Baker, The Artwork Caught by the Tail, pp. 289–337.
26. Michelson, “Painting. Instantaneism. Cinema. America. Ballet. Illumination. Apollinaire,”
p. 194.
27. Francis Picabia, “Instantanéisme,” Comoedia, November 21, 1924; reprinted in Picabia, Écrits,
vol. 2, pp. 159–60. Here, Picabia participates in—or even prefigures—a more general embrace, com-
mon to the 1920s in Europe, of “distraction” as a perceptual mode. Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of
Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” would be the most famous example of this
embrace, but see too Siegfried Kracauer, “Cult of Distraction: On Berlin’s Picture Palaces [1926],” New
German Critique 40 (Winter 1987), pp. 91–96.
The Body after Cubism 49

love-making, comparable to the voluptuousness of lying in the sun, of doing 120 in

your car, comparable to the pleasure of boxing or of someone stretched out on
the mat of an opium den.”28 To achieve this project, Picabia required an aesthetic
of endless motion, only one of whose embodiments would be found in film.

Indeed, the “desiring” or broadly physical and corporeal model of film that
Michelson identifies as Picabia’s own emerges as an aesthetic most powerfully in
the moment of the artist’s transformation of early Cubism. While Michael Taylor
has read Picabia’s Orphic paintings as deeply indebted to Léger’s earlier “tubular”
mode of Cubism, their bodily intensity represents a long-overlooked counter-
model for post-Cubist painting.29
If Danses à la source [I] presents the viewer with a still-recognizable bodily
source—with figures, the trope of the bathers, typical progeny of Cézanne—
these bodies were for Picabia opened up by the movements of dance. This is
more than a metaphor, surely more than simple “content”; it becomes a formal
procedure of the paintings that Picabia began to produce, the tortured geome-
tries and constant, excessive shifting of figural planes in space and depth an ana-
logue for the mobility of the represented bodies. The corporeal movement and
kinesthetic effects of dance are the motivations that begin the painting series.
But with this formal analogy in place, the bodily reference in Danses à la source
[I] could be quickly jettisoned, with the effect being not a more complete
abstraction unmoored from the body, but one that itself unmoors the body, that
generalizes and denaturalizes the body’s effects, spreading the “bodily” across
the entire face, the thickened surface, of Picabia’s painting. This is what abstrac-
tion “does,” what Cubism “does,” to the body in Picabia’s hands. Cubism’s for-
mal paradoxes—its dizzying and excessive sensorial possibilities, as the naturalis-
tic motivations for illusionism come unhinged—convert a painting of bodies
into a bodily painting. In other words, a “phenomenological” model of Cubist
painting emerges, but one that is now far from the Cézanne model of direct
physical perception before the motif.30
Picabia seemed extraordinarily self-aware of his phenomenological intensi-
fication of Cubist painting: A title like Culture physique (Physical Culture) (1913)
reflexively names not just the health-and-sports movement of the epoch (and the
eponymous journal, in which Apollinaire participated) but also the bodily or
28. Francis Picabia, “A propos de ‘Relâche,’ Ballet Instantanéiste,” Comoedia, November 27, 1924;
reprinted in Picabia, Écrits, vol. 2, pp. 163–64.
29. See Taylor, “Francis Picabia: Abstraction and Sincerity,” p. 110.
30. The emergence of almost every one of Picabia’s Orphist paintings from the space of memory as
opposed to direct perception—which I have already pointed to in works like Danses à la source [I] and La
Procession, Séville, and which becomes self-reflexive in the 1914 canvas Je revois en souvenir ma chère Udnie (I See
Again in Memory My Dear Udnie)—has been widely discussed in the literature, and serves to differentiate
Picabia’s phenomenological and subjective model from prior endeavors such as that of Cézanne.
50 OCTOBER

Picabia. Culture physique. 1913.

© 2016 Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

corporeal space of the form of painting that the artist wanted to achieve. 31 With
undulating, biomorphic planes, and passages and interiors like the viscera, with
kinesthetic vectors like arms tracing arcs in space, and a stew of tones both ashen
and vibrant, full of fleshly pinks and creams and browns, Culture physique shares
the general formal characteristics of this moment of Picabia’s painting. It con-
fronts us with a deeply linear and planar array of juxtaposed shapes and disori-
enting spatial markers, in which however line itself has been uncannily sup-
pressed, intimating a leakage or porousness of forms in the paradoxical pres-
ence of contour and sharp delineation.

31. As noted above, I first delivered the core of this essay as a lecture at a Léger conference in
the fall of 2013; part of it dates back to my dissertation on Picabia, completed in 2000. Subsequent to
the drafting of the essay’s final form, I was made aware of Arnauld Pierre’s new essay on Picabia’s early
abstractions, whose title and concerns seem very close to my own. I rather see the essays as divergent, or
perhaps, more optimistically, as potential complements to each other: Pierre’s analysis is more discur-
sive than formal in nature, a kind of New-Historicist mapping of a series of figures and thinkers crucial
to ideas of kinesis and corporeality as they relate to the birth of abstract art.
However, Pierre often seems to offer such discourses as “sources” that would explain the mean-
ing of Picabia’s various works, and here we do diverge in methodology and approach. In a series of
prior essays of which I was aware when this essay was drafted, and intensified in his recent text, Pierre
“decodes,” for example, Picabia’s abstract title for the painting Udnie as a specific reference to the
music critic who went by the name Jean d’Udine, and thus as embodying a direct engagement with his
ideas. I am joined by writers like Michael Taylor in not finding this attribution entirely useful or con-
vincing (Picabia never mentions this figure anywhere else that I am aware), while the artist himself
later “decoded” his title as an anagram of the words “une di” or “une dimensionel”—i.e., a formal quality,
one-dimensional, flat. As displayed in the recent catalogue raisonné, Picabia scholarship has become
far too attached to the “empirical,” to source-finding and a general iconographism that often belies the
strength and the operation of Picabia’s work itself.
Strangely, my own work, from my dissertation to several subsequent essays and an entire book
on Picabia that opens with his dialogue with Apollinaire in 1912, has been excluded from the bibliogra-
phy of this recent publication. See Arnauld Pierre, “‘Culture physique’: Mobility and Corporeality in
Picabia’s Abstract Painting,” in Camfield et al., Francis Picabia: Catalogue Raisonné, pp. 116–47. Also see
Arnauld Pierre, “Sauver la peinture: l’orphisme,” in Francis Picabia: La Peinture sans aura (Paris:
Gallimard, 2002), pp. 69–112.
The Body after Cubism 51

Coming after Picabia’s visit to New York in early 1913 for the Armory Show,
the forms of Culture physique have passed on from the Horta de Ebro–type play of
abstraction as a paradoxical and deeply physical illusionism-in-excess. Instead, they
embody Picabia’s direct response to the newly reestablished shapes and planes of
more recent Synthetic Cubism. And they are an immediate assault on the enforced
enclosure of such Cubist work and its constructive building of form. For Picabia’s
watercolors, initiated just before Culture physique, exacerbate precisely the formal
leakage of the painting in their medium’s inherent bleeding and fluid spread; in
fact, the watercolors that Picabia made around the time of the Armory Show for an
exhibition at Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 gallery seem to be produced precisely to bring
the capacities of watercolor to bear on the phenomenological excess and general
direction of the artist’s project. And so now small works on paper come to accom-
pany the artist’s giant paintings, with the genteel and nature-bound history of
watercolor counterintuitively dedicated to the city and the urban as subjects.
Works like New York (1913), however, transmute even that urban space into a cor-
poreal one, blushing red or pinkly flesh-toned, glowing—one might even say “flow-
ing”—with the pulsations of desire.
The whole painterly project of Picabia’s Orphism is one of extending and radi-
calizing a corporeal Cubism. Already during his American sojourn, the artist self-
reflexively names his project a phenomenological one, in the most unexpected and
extraordinary way for the period, in the work he called La Ville de New York aperçue à
travers le corps (The City of New York Perceived through the Body) (1913). It is an astounding
title. Long interpreted, too narrowly, as a reference to technology, to the scientific
vision of the X-ray machine that pierces the surface of the physical—and which
Picabia would then be understood as comparing to the workings of modernist
abstraction—the title instead underlines a painterly space that is the opposite of one

Picabia. La Ville de New

York aperçue à travers
le corps. 1913. © 2016
Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York /
ADAGP, Paris.
52 OCTOBER

in which underlying structures are suddenly revealed.32 In La Ville de New York aperçue
à travers le corps, structure itself comes to be swept away, by what seems the force of
bodily innervation and erotic pulsion alone.
For this picture takes a New York or city painting, and literally flips it upside
down, reversing the image—as in mechanical reproduction, perhaps—but also
enacting a physical act of rotation upon the object of painting. This flipping or
looping produces the effect of further abstraction, like the undulating curves that,
at this moment in Picabia’s art, everywhere begin to overtake prior Cubist frag-
mentation. We face a composition literally without orientation, perhaps owing to it
having been made in a horizontal, table-bound position—a work on paper labored
on from all sides at once in its production. And in its rotation, the work simultane-
ously envisions a mobile spectator—the next step in Picabia’s deployment of the
dance metaphor—who finds her summons in the production of a mobile form,
one that depends on a kind of deep structural instability. It is as if we face a top-
heavy array of forms, a nervous, almost twitching composition without a base, with-
out orientation or direction, and thus too a form without constructive plausibility.
There is some solidity: Obliques push back hard into space, only to flip in percep-
tual reversal, suddenly projecting forward as well as back, a reversibility that echoes
and exacerbates the physical flipping of the entire composition. The result is an
extreme disorientation, as the viewer faces teetering, impossible forms, a visual
scene where it is as if vertigo, motion, and indeed motion sickness—a bodily inner-
vation pushed to excess—could be extended to and enacted by the painting itself.
It was the Belgian Surrealist E. L. T. Mesens who first suggested that La Ville
de New York aperçue à travers le corps was produced by flipping a composition upside
down.33 We know it is a procedure that Picabia’s work seems not only to follow but
to intensify, pushing this formal anti-principle even further, working on his images
from all sides. Indeed, Picabia signed one of these 1913 works, Untitled (Abstract
Composition), on all four sides, as if it were made to rotate now in its hanging and
thus in its apperception—in all directions.34
Facing the intense bodily kinesthetics of such works, their formal or spatial
leakage, and the devices of directionless motion or physical and literal disorienta-
tion employed in their production as paintings, we can understand anew the large-
ly square format of the majority of Picabia’s key paintings at this moment. For the
square is what could be called a “neutral” format, an anti-hierarchical shape, and
one that is not keyed to the widening landscape-orientation of normative human
32. See Linda Dalrymple Henderson, “X Rays and the Quest for Invisible Reality in the Art of
Kupka, Duchamp, and the Cubists,” Art Journal 47 (Winter 1988), pp. 323–40; and “Francis Picabia,
Radiometers, and X-Rays in 1913,” Art Bulletin 71 (March 1989), pp. 114–23. Also see Willard Bohn,
“Picabia’s ‘Mechanical Expression’ and the Demise of the Object,” Art Bulletin 67 (December 1985),
pp. 673–77.
33. E. L. T. Mesens, The Cubist Spirit in Its Time (London: The London Gallery, 1947); cited in
Camfield, Francis Picabia: His Art, Life and Times, p. 50.
34. Picabia would continue to inscribe canvases and pictures on all four sides, most famously in
Natures Mortes (1920), now lost. Many contemporary painters, from Mike Kelley to Martin
Kippenberger to Richard Hawkins, have returned to this device.
The Body after Cubism 53

Picabia. Sans titre

(Composition abstraite).
1913. © 2016 Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New
York / ADAGP, Paris.

perception. It is, instead, the feeding ground of a negation of orientation itself,

the seedbed of a kind of formal directionlessness, a painting without fixed orienta-
tion or ground.35
We can understand, as well, the strange, abstract titles that descend on the cul-
minating works of the series, Udnie (Jeune fille américaine; danse) and Edtaonisl (ecclésias-
tique) (1913). The title Edtaonisl, long ago “decoded” as an anagram, was produced by
subtracting the final letter from two French words, étoile and danse—“star” and
“dance,” the latter the great theme of Picabia’s first New York sojourn—and then
combining them, so that each penetrates the other, letter by letter.36 The point of
such a procedure is not to initiate a search for hidden meaning, as if that were the
essence of “abstraction,” but to mirror the erotic contagion of Picabia’s disorienting,
shattered color planes and their excessive, dizzying recombinatory movement.
Indeed, the final letter e in the two fused words of Picabia’s title is not so much miss-
ing as present in the initial letter of the title itself, to which the reader/viewer then
circles back, creating a fragmented word that imagines both an erotic coupling and
an endless circulation or spinning rotation in its mode of operation, its illegible legi-
bility—another analog for the painterly forms that it accompanies.
And we can understand anew the issue of scale in the masterworks of this
moment. Udnie and Edtaonisl are huge paintings, nearly ten feet square, surpass-
35. It is interesting to compare Picabia’s deployment of the square canvas with the most impor-
tant use of such a format at this moment of modernist painting: Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
(1907), the last great “phenomenological” painting of the recent French tradition.
36. The title was first unpacked in the painter Philip Pearlstein’s “The Paintings of Francis
Picabia” (master’s thesis, New York University Institute of Fine Arts, 1955), p. 109; cited in Camfield,
Francis Picabia: His Art, Life and Times, p. 61. With a nod to Duchamp, Pearlstein suggested a partial ana-
gram of nudité as the solution to the title Udnie; I discuss Arnauld Pierre’s more recent hypothesis in
footnote 31 above. Picabia’s own suggestion of “une di” or “one-dimensional” is the only solution that
functions in the exact same manner as Edtaonisl, recombining two partial words, skipping every other
letter. If an answer is required, Picabia’s statement is clearly to be preferred, though Camfield thought
it a mere “joke” on the painter’s part.
54 OCTOBER

ing even Picabia’s most expansive Cubist works. As an intentional pair, equal in
size, the works seem to operate however through relations of inversion. William
Camfield long ago pointed out that of the two canvases one seems centripetal
and the other centrifugal, with Udnie more “extroverted,” always pushing out
against its edges, and Edtaonisl formally “introverted,” an affair of internal com-
pression and movement toward a “cluster” of forms at its middle. 37 This can be
pushed further. For Udnie imagines a space of light, while Edtaonisl gathers itself
against a space of intense darkness. And then this opposition comes to be invert-
ed, as Udnie, the lighter canvas, gravitates toward a condition of the mono-
chrome, toward gray and black and white; while Edtaonisl, the darker scene,
erupts in color, in bold purples, royal blues, reds, and radiant gold. Such inver-
sions between the two paintings amplify the other forms of flipping and rotation
that Picabia deployed, as the two works’ oblique planes read simultaneously as
vectors, their effects of recession in space carrying forward the constant reading
in this series of forms set in motion. Oppositions structure the two canvases
throughout, but these are oppositions worked in excess and on both sides of a
divide opened up by reversal and inversion. Miniature forms pepper the canvas-
es, especially at the center of Udnie—the dashes and curlicues and ridiculous
polka dots that Picabia, in fact, will never abandon—to throw into relief the vast-
ness of the work’s expanse. And with this we sense that the monumental format
of Picabia’s abstract painting functions not just to occupy the remaindered space
of the salon machine or of history painting—like a throwback to or memory of
the past—but also to allow the phenomenological engagement of Picabia’s work
definitively to surpass the limits of the Cubist easel painting.
This is a crucial development that art history has barely recognized, hardly
touched, no matter the overwhelming formal evidence of the paintings them-
selves. The physical movement and spatial disorientation of these works extend to
their phenomenological interaction with the viewer, their almost total engulfment
or absorption of the viewer. The paintings produce effects of anamorphosis and
distortion through corporeal engagement beyond the flat picture plane, the mere
limits of the pictorial. Another opposition—between the work and its viewer—
comes to be worked excessively, perhaps undone. The high point of this develop-
ment is Edtaonisl, which in its massive expanse imagines not a depiction but a phys-
ical experience of vertigo, and nausea, and dizziness, and spinning or spiraling
movement, as a continuum shared with the body of the viewer—a spectator
immersed in and absorbed by the physical space of the painting through the sheer
extensiveness of its literal scale. This immersive continuum is another—perhaps
the most important—of the corporeal effects of the painterly model that Picabia
suddenly embraced.
And so here, by 1913, we face the emergence of a quite specific phenomeno-
logical model for post-Cubist painting, a model of Cubist-derived abstraction as

37. Camfield, Francis Picabia: His Art, Life and Times, p. 60.
 Top: Picabia. Udnie (Jeune fille americaine; danse). 1913.
Bottom: Picabia. Edtaonisl (Ecclesiastique). 1913.
© 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.
56 OCTOBER

phenomenological or bodily excess. This phenomenological excess is the precise

sign of the abstraction of the body, of the body given over to processes of unmooring
and abstraction. In other words, for Picabia, such excess is the very experience of
the corporeal becoming abstract, not canceled but raised to a higher power.

Speaking genealogically: To extend the body in the wake of Cubism, to imag-

ine an intensified corporeal model of Cubist painting and of its aftermath—as
opposed to the old story of a modernist break with figuration—this requires a dif-
ferent imagination of the work of Cubism itself, and this revision should be
extended to its founders and shapers, to artists like Picasso.
Art history has of course undertaken a great quarantine effort with Picasso’s
Cubism, seeing and narrating its deep doubt and modernist critique of pictorial illu-
sionism as an assault upon figuration and the bodily language of painting altogether.
But this bodily language of painting represents the most important, central, and pas-
sionate aspect of Picasso’s art, from beginning to end—with Cubism positioned at
times as the great exception, the moment of transcendence, and this to art history’s
seeming deep relief. The quarantine has meant the severing, for example, of
Cubism from Picasso’s early Symbolist concerns with androgyny and states of sexual
or gendered deviation, artificiality, or fluidity—with what we could rename the
artist’s intense investment, early on in his work, with the profoundly de-structuring
and de-naturalizing effects of the body, or of a bodily painting.38 In works like the
Barnes Foundation’s The Peasants (1906), we face a painterly aesthetic that in its play
with the twin extremes of enlargement and diminution, with bodily excess on both
sides of the corporeal divide, paradoxically opens up connections between or,
rather, de-differentiates the strict coordinates of male and female; or human and
animal; or nature and culture, subject and object—the big and structuring opposi-
tions of sense and painting now called off through corporeal or figurative play. What
might it mean not to allow such putative Symbolist tropes and dynamics to fall away
from our narratives of Cubist modernism?
Art history has also, as we know, required the severing of Picasso’s greatest
painting, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), with its erotic, modern-life scene of
brothel and prostitute, from the major formal accomplishments of later Cubist
analysis.39 Let me trace, instead, one intensification and “abstraction” of the corpo-
38. The best essay on this moment in Picasso’s development remains Margaret Werth,
“Representing the Body in 1906,” in Picasso: The Early Years, 1892–1906, ed. Marilyn McCully
(Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1997), pp. 277–85.
39. This has been the effect, paradoxically, of the greatest essay written on Picasso’s painting,
Leo Steinberg’s “The Philosophical Brothel,” October 44 (Spring 1988), pp. 7–74 (originally published
in Art News in 1972). Rebutting the claim that the Demoiselles was the “first Cubist painting,” Steinberg
clarified the erotic and sexual logic of the work, using a broadly phenomenological approach that
remains crucial to my thoughts here. But in doing so, Steinberg pried the Demoiselles loose from the
development of Cubism, a severing echoed by the work of Picasso scholars such as William Rubin and
others to follow, as if the erotic and the formal in Picasso’s painting needed to be sundered for Cubism
The Body after Cubism 57

real that leads from the Demoiselles

directly into Cubism. Elsewhere, I
have written about the extreme
importance of one figure above all in
Picasso’s great painting, the multidi-
rectional “Squatter” at the picture’s
bottom right.40 This folded and de-
structured or de-differentiated body
notoriously faces forward and back
simultaneously, and horrifyingly so
for some, undoing both the painterly
medium’s spatial conventions and
any remaining unity of perspectival
form. But this is a painted body that
also confronts us with a collision and
collapse of a host of other opposi-
tions, of the difference, say, between
Picasso. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. 1907.
flat and volumetric form, between
© 2016 Estate of Pablo Picasso /
two- and three-dimensionality, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
between the hollowing-out or cri-
tique of pictorial illusionism (on one side of the body) and a kind of illusionism-
in-excess (on the other), to the point that the anatomy of this body seems to read
as gendered in contradiction, to read once more as potentially both male and
female at once. And the collapses keep reverberating, as this is the body in which
Picasso makes the shift between his so-called Iberian and African styles, between a
succession of primitivisms inspired by Europe and then by the non-European in
turn, a collision that intimates a much more radical form of the indistinction
between self and other that modernist primitivism always confronts.
Such reverberation comes to be the Squatter’s pictorial “function,” as “she”
offers up a series of her bodily forms to the other depicted bodies and objects else-
where in the painting. The lowered position of the Squatter focuses the viewer’s
attention on the veritable engine of this body’s collapse, on the double curves of
the crouching figure’s backside or buttocks, a bodily sign that echoes the similarly
de-structured and multifunctioning curves and double curves of other figures and
forms in the painting, from the Squatter’s own crotch-like folded leg to the phallic
wedge of melon nearby, from the curved blade of the nose of the Squatter’s mask
to the curtain-parting nude’s adjacent hip or flank, and on to the so-called stand-

to proceed. See, also, Yve-Alain Bois, “Painting as Trauma,” Art in America 76, no. 6 (June 1988),
expanded and revised in Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, ed. Christopher Green (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 31–54.
40. George Baker, “The Squatter: Reconsidering Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” in
Cornerstones, ed. Juan Gaitán, Nicolaus Schafhausen, and Monika Szewczyck (Rotterdam: Witte de With
Editions and Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), pp. 8–36.
58 OCTOBER

ing gisante second from the left and “her”

notoriously schematized, and thus indis-
tinct, breasts or pectorals. The double curve
becomes a form and a bodily sign—from
the two-sided Squatter to the recumbent
Stander, from the buttocks to the breasts,
from the lowest parts of the body on up—
that we can then trace expanded and dis-
seminated everywhere into the space of
Picasso’s later Cubism.
For as he moves up even higher, from
body to head, and supposedly then from
corporeality to intellection, in his great
series of nudes and portrait busts of
Fernande Olivier painted at the so-called
moment of the “birth” of Cubism in 1909,
Picasso focuses on a more or less identical
double curve—but now flipped and
reversed—appearing repeatedly and at
times egregiously in the hair trait known in
English, melancholically, as a “widow’s
peak.” But this double curve abstracts from,
and in certain images seems especially to
carry, the erotic memory of the form of but-
tocks or breasts, in an almost classic
Freudian transposition or displacement of
low onto high.41 The communicating curves
of the widow’s peak become precisely the
shape that allows formal contamination,
hybridization, and at times a kind of com-
munion between body and world, between
the figure and the contrary and uncanny
intimation of landscape or mountain, in the
larger Fernande series; or at other times, its
folds more booklike than bodily, it contin-
ues to offer up forms of erotic contagion, Top: Picasso. Head of a
physical or corporeal heterogeneity, that in Woman. 1909.
Bottom: Picasso. Girl with
41. For the most important and detailed a Mandolin (Fanny
account of this series of works, see the catalogue for Tellier). 1910.
the exhibition by Jeffrey Weiss, Picasso: The Cubist © 2016 Estate of Pablo
Portraits of Fernande Olivier (Princeton: Princeton Picasso / Artists Rights
University Press, 2003). Society (ARS), New York.
The Body after Cubism 59

fact only intensify in the later development

of Cubism and collage.
Reversed again, slightly later, the
widow’s peak becomes readable as “bangs”
in Picasso’s Girl with a Mandolin (1910), the
painting Rosalind Krauss has focused on as
a testament to the artist’s melancholic regis-
tration of the withdrawal of the corporeal
from the purview of Cubist analysis, and the
spark that fed Picasso’s necessary movement
toward a more radical return of the physical
and the intense contradictions that struc-
ture the model of collage two years later.42
But the form I am tracking erupts again, of
course, in Picasso’s collage, now multi-func-
tioning as the edge or profile of the musical
instrument of Picasso’s Cubist still lifes that
is the guitar. And yet, once you see the dou-
ble communicating curve as a widow’s peak;
or as pectoral and breast; or indeed as but-
tocks or bottom, as bodily in this way, the
corporeal semiotics of this form can never
really be entirely forgotten. Abstraction will
need to be reconceived, beyond repression.
Complicating (and intensifying) the story of
semiotic play that has been associated with
this shape and with these works, Picasso
deployed the multi-signifying capacity of a
body loosed into a free-floating form,
abstracted now in this way, as an intensifica-
tion of the corporeal once more—an inten-
sification, we might say, of erotic or bodily
effects of collapse, de-structuring, and het-
erogeneity—as the shape works in other
specific collages as a facial profile as well as
a widow’s peak, but also fuses guitar shapes Picasso. Guitar with Sheet
Music and Glass. 1912.
to representations of violins, in still lifes Picasso. Man with a Hat. 1912.
that have a monstrosity and hybridity to © 2016 Estate of Pablo Picasso /
them that perhaps only Leo Steinberg has Artists Rights Society (ARS),
ever truly realized.43 We confront a spiral- New York.

42. Krauss, “The Motivation of the Sign,” p. 271.

43. See Leo Steinberg, “Touring the Stockholm
Collage,” in Cubist Picasso, ed. Anne Baldessari (Paris:
Flammarion, 2007).
60 OCTOBER

Picasso. Siphon, Glass, Newspaper, and Violin. 1912.

© 2016 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

ing series of monster violins, Frankenstein guitars, centaur- or satyr-like hybrids

with faces and bottoms, objects and bodies, violins and guitars fused and appear-
ing simultaneously, and throbbing in red and pink—like Picabia’s work of the
same moment—throbbing into high erotic relief.44

44. Sebastian Zeidler makes very similar claims for a series of analytic Cubist paintings by Braque. I
point the reader to Zeidler, “Cubism’s Passion,” in Form as Revolt: Carl Einstein and the Ground of Modern Art
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015). The relevant part of Zeidler’s reading of the erotic signifiers in
Cubist painting was previewed in “Braque’s Passion,” in Das Problem der Form: Interferenzen zwischen moderner
Kunst und Kunstwissenschaft (1890–1960), ed. Hans Aurenhammer and Regine Prange, Neue Frankfurter
Forschungen zur Kunst (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 2013). The point of my reading and Zeidler’s (as I under-
stand it) is not to collapse the erotic into a series of signifieds but to understand the operation of a set of
paradoxical modernist signifiers, a force that structures the Cubist enterprise in various ways. In this my
readings of the erotic and corporeal stakes of Cubism hope to differ essentially from older forays such as
Robert Rosenblum, “Picasso and the Typography of Cubism,” in Picasso in Retrospect, ed. John Golding and
Roland Penrose (New York: Praeger, 1973).
The Body after Cubism 61

The genealogy I am sketching is one that hopefully mitigates the radical

break—a stylistic or morphological break but perhaps not an aesthetic one—that
has been sensed between the emergence of Dada, specifically the Dada ready-
made, and earlier Cubist painting. Rather than a break, certain Dada languages
represent the next step in a further intensification of this abstracting of the body,
of precisely this corporeal model. We have long known that the Dada readymade
can be read as an abstracting of the corporeal itself, or conversely a return of the
corporeal to the work of art, and that its inspiration or starting point was precisely
the innovations of Cubism, namely, the heterogeneous materials of Cubist collage.
But I want to register here the sense that the phenomenological continuum
established by 1913 in the wake of Cubism and collage, by Picabia in his Orphic
works, has its own specificity; and that it finds its concrete extension in that aspect of
Dada where Picabia would come to make the greatest contribution, with those pictor-
ial forms that David Joselit has called “Dada’s diagrams,” the diagrammatic forms of
connection and becoming registered in Dada machine drawings and
mechanomorphs.45 This genealogy seems crucial, as the untold story remains the
extension of such diagrammatic language in later chapters of modernism, in the bod-
ily “returns” of the 1920s, for example, where a painter like Miró becomes the great
explorer of a further step in what must now be narrated as a process of corporeal
abstraction, the key exponent of what could also be called a fully diagrammatic figu-
ration—a relatively unexplored painterly development within modernism to which
many former Cubists from Picasso to Léger would respond and contribute as well.
The key to giving this history its due lies in the great phenomenological
morass of the prewar Orphic Cubist work I have examined here. Art history’s pri-
mary story of the emergence of Dada by around 1915 in Duchamp’s and Picabia’s
work, a thematic movement from the viscera to the machine—this needs to be
reconceived as a passage between semiotic languages, or pictorial models, from
the phenomenological to the diagrammatic. More even than this: The complex
workings of diagrammatic spatiality in modernism must be examined in relation to
the earlier phenomenological excess that has been my quarry. Ultimately, the dia-
grammatic forms of interwar modernism will perform a much more complex task
than the phenomenological vectoring of these earlier years. But that vectoring—
already announced as such in the transitional works Picabia makes throughout
1914, in the aftermath of Udnie and Edtaonisl, as line reawakens in his work (in the
veritable scribble of the second, smaller version of Udnie, formerly called Petite
Udnie [Little Udnie], c. 1913–14), as representational fragments come to the fore
45. David Joselit, “Dada’s Diagrams,” in The Dada Seminars, ed. Leah Dickerman with Matthew S.
Witkovsky (Washington: The National Gallery of Art, 2005), pp. 221–39. See also Joselit, “Painting
Stripped Bare,” in Dickerman, Inventing Abstraction, pp. 172–73.
62 OCTOBER

Picabia. Je revois en souvenir

ma chère Udnie. 1914.
© 2016 Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

once more (in the “intestinal” passageways of Mariage comique [Comic Wedlock]
[1914], or the scattered lips, ears, eyes, breasts, bellies, and buttocks of C’est de moi
qu’il s’agit [This Is About Me] [1914]), as machinic and erotic metaphors take over
from the trope of dance (definitively in the culminating work Je revois en souvenir
ma chère Udnie [1914])—this vectoring provides the transition to the diagrammatic
figuration that is to come, a kind of vast network of displaced corporeal integers
connected now beyond physical or phenomenological experience.
In other words: From phenomenology to the diagram, continuum
becomes connection. From the morass of the phenomenological model of an
excessive and intensified corporeal Cubism, we move to the networks in which
body and figuration, having been abstracted, can be seen as caught up. This is the
trajectory and the modernist story—quite different from the “return to order”—
that needs now to be told.46 It is a trajectory, a literal voyage, that art history has
not until recently been equipped fully to describe, to narrate, and to understand.

46. See my recent essay “Picabia and Calder: A Trajectory,” in Transparence: Calder/Picabia
(Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2015), pp. 17–33.