Decoding Picabia
Abstract
Journal of the American Psychiatric Nurses Association This Month's Cover Decoding Picabia According to cover artist Picabia (1879-1953) "there is only one way to save your life; sacrifice your reputation" (cited in Camfield, 1970, p. 13). Over a fertile and publicly controversial lifetime spent produc- ing and defending Modernist art and poetry, Picabia was lauded and reviled by important critics from every decade, right up to the pre- sent, when fashionable galleries show his work as part of a renewed interest in mixed-media commen- tary on popular culture. Contempo- rary analyst Auty (1988) described the defiant Dada movement (well exemplified by Picabia's work) as anti-art, writing that "their purposes seem to me to have much in com- mon with a desire to pull faces at any we deem middle class or con- ventional" (p. 33). Although many cultural historians marvel at the way Picabia is one of the first to have appropriated material from advertis- ing and the popular press into his vulgar and satirical mature paintings (lamenting an apparent loss of early talent and precocity), others praise the very same work as "both trash and a commentary on trash" (Holst, 1989, p. 176). Revisionists claim that some