Get a sneak preview of the latest hit exhibit from the Museum of Modern Art at 7 p.m., Thursday, Dec. 1: “Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round so Our Thoughts Can Change Direction” is a comprehensive survey of Picabia’s audacious, irreverent, and profoundly influential work across mediums. This will be the first exhibition in the United States to chart his entire career.
Among the great modern artists of the past century, Francis Picabia (French, 1879–1953) also remains one of the most elusive. He vigorously avoided any singular style, and his work encompassed painting, poetry, publishing, performance and film.
Long considered the ‘playboy prankster’ of Modernism, Picabia was enigmatic: first an Impressionist, then a Cubist, now a Dadaist — the constant reinvention goes on and on. In an exhibit of 241 works, spanning a variety of mediums across the breadth of his career, Picabia defies pigeonholing with one exception — the sheer energy of his exploration.
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— Here’s another presentation on the exhibit (37:28 long):
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Though he is best known as one of the leaders of the Dada movement, his career ranged widely — and wildly — from Impressionism to radical abstraction, from Dadaist provocation to pseudo-classicism, and from photo-based realism to art informel.
Picabia’s consistent inconsistencies, his appropriative strategies, and his stylistic eclecticism, along with his skeptical attitude, make him especially relevant for contemporary artists, and his career as a whole challenges familiar narratives of the avant-garde.
About the Presenter
The speaker, Masha Chlenova, is an art historian and curator who specializes in modern art with a focus on the historical avant-gardes.
Masha Chlenova is an art historian and curator specializing in modern art with a focus on the historical avant-gardes. She holds a PhD. in Art History from Columbia University in New York and has worked in curatorial departments at the Jewish Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Museum.
Most recently she worked at the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, where she co-organized, with Leah Dickerman, a major survey of abstraction across the mediums entitled Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925 and worked for a year on the retrospective of Francis Picabia.
She currently teaches art history at New School University and works as an independent curator. Her writing has appeared in scholarly journals and in exhibition catalogs of major museums, including The Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and Tate Modern.