DADA · WORK

Ici, c'est ici Stieglitz

Francis Picabia · 1915

A portrait of the photographer Alfred Stieglitz that contains no face at all: he is drawn as a folding bellows camera, broken, its lens drooping, straining up toward the word IDEAL and getting nowhere because the gears are in neutral and the brake is on. Affection and mockery in one deadpan machine.

The canvas

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Francis Picabia, Ici, c'est ici Stieglitz, 1915. Ink, graphite, and pasted and printed papers on paper. 2 ft 5 7/8 in × 1 ft 8 in.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949 (acc. 49.70.14)

Look closer

Find these on the canvas above

The folding bellows camera
The whole central body of the drawing: the upright accordion-pleated camera that stands in for Stieglitz
There is no face anywhere. The figure of Stieglitz is entirely a folding plate camera (read by scholars as the popular Vest Pocket Kodak, copied from a period advertisement), its pleated leather bellows and lens board standing upright like a body. Recognizing it as a real, advertised consumer camera is half the joke: the great artist of photography is drawn as a piece of mass-produced photographic hardware.
The limp extended lens
The lens and bellows, pulled out but slack rather than aimed sharply
The bellows are extended but disengaged, the lens drooping rather than focusing, a camera that cannot quite point itself. Scholars read it plainly as broken, even as sexual deflation. Whatever the reading, what is on the sheet is a precise mechanical thing drawn as failing to do the one thing it exists to do.
The word IDEAL
Lettered toward the top, in heavy Gothic blackletter, on the lever plate the camera strains up toward
At the top, in a heavy Gothic (blackletter) script, sits the word IDEAL. It is the thing the whole machine reaches for: the camera strains upward toward it. And, per the picture’s own logic, it never gets there. The lettering does the work a halo or an inscription would do in an old portrait, naming the sitter’s aspiration in block capitals.
FOI ET AMOUR (faith and love)
Inscribed with the title phrase, low on the sheet
The words FOI ET AMOUR, French for "faith and love," are inscribed along with the title phrase Ici, c’est ici Stieglitz ("Here, this is Stieglitz here"). This is the vocabulary of devotion, attached to a stalled machine, and it is what tips the whole drawing from a gag toward something fonder. The tone of the picture lives in the gap between those tender words and the broken mechanism they are pinned to.
The gearshift in neutral
An automobile shift lever, drawn lodged out of gear
An automobile gearshift, the lever that should drive the climb up to IDEAL, is drawn set in neutral (or park), out of gear. The mechanism that would deliver power to the rest of the machine is deliberately disengaged. The picture is built from machine parts that have been arranged, with a straight face, so that none of them can do their job.
The engaged hand-brake
A set brake lever, the second "going nowhere" cue
A hand-brake is shown engaged. Together with the neutral gear, it is the deadpan punchline of the drawing: all this faith and love, all this straining toward the Ideal, and the thing is simply parked. The standard reading is a portrait of idealism that has stalled, the 291 circle’s worry that their tireless champion had lost his drive, said gently, in the language of engineering.

The story · 5 chapters

~18 min total

New York · 1915

A French painter, a wartime crossing, and the gallery called 291

Picabia flees the war in Europe, lands in New York, and falls in with the circle around the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, whose Fifth Avenue gallery and little magazine, both named 291, were the headquarters of modern art in America. Out of it comes a new kind of portrait.

The idea

A man drawn as a machine

Picabia portrays the people of the 291 circle not as faces but as machines, copied from advertisements and patent diagrams in a flat, deadpan, commercial style. The object-portrait, or mechanomorph, is the circle’s new thing (Marius de Zayas had already de-faced the portrait by 1913); Picabia pushes it furthest, and Stieglitz gets the cover.

The drawing

The broken camera that cannot reach the Ideal

The folding camera that is Stieglitz, its limp extended lens, the word IDEAL it strains toward, the automobile gearshift sitting in neutral, the hand-brake set, and the words FOI ET AMOUR (faith and love) that give the whole thing its tone.

The break

Throwing the human figure out of the portrait

For centuries a portrait meant a likeness: a face, a body, a soul rendered by the artist’s hand. Picabia substitutes a labelled machine lifted from a catalogue, with printed words doing the characterizing. Portraiture becomes ready-made-and-caption, and that rupture feeds straight into Dada.

After

The sitter who kept his own caricature

Stieglitz, the man gently mocked as a stalled machine, owned the drawing, and it came to the Met from his own collection in 1949. The verbatim machine credo Picabia gave a New York newspaper that same autumn, and the question the picture never quite settles: homage, or satire?

1915

Made

2′5⅞″ × 1′8″

Dimensions

The Met

Now at

Provenance

Every hand it passed through

1915

Francis Picabia (the artist) / 291 magazine

New York

Made in New York in 1915 as the working mock-up and cover of the little magazine 291, nos. 5–6 (July–August 1915), with its cut-and-pasted strips of printed words and visible pencil corrections. (The Wikimedia file calls it the cover of No. 1; that is wrong, and No. 1 was March 1915.)

by the 1940s

Alfred Stieglitz (the photographer it portrays)

New York

The drawing entered the holdings of Alfred Stieglitz himself, the very man it caricatures. How and exactly when he acquired it is not spelled out in the record; what is documented is that it was his.

1949–today

Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949

The Metropolitan Museum of ArtMuseum

New York

Came to the Met in 1949 as part of the Alfred Stieglitz Collection, distributed from his estate after his death in 1946. Credit line: Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949. Accession 49.70.14. The Met catalogues the drawing under the short title "Here, This Is Stieglitz Here."