Picabia, Francis

Related Category: European Art, 1600 to the Present: Biographies

(pĕkä´bēä), 1878–1953, French painter. After working in an impressionist style, Picabia was influenced by cubism and later was one of the original exponents of Dada in Europe and the United States. He contributed to avant-garde periodicals and became associated with the Paris surrealists. Picabia, possessed of an intensely individual temperament, influenced numerous artists of different schools without ever confining himself to one mode of artistic expression. His Physical Culture (1913) is at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.