The sitter who kept his own caricature

That same autumn, Picabia put the whole theory behind this picture into plain words. A New York newspaper, the New-York Tribune, ran an interview with the French artists then in the city, published on Sunday, October 24, 1915, under the headline “French Artists Spur on an American Art.” In it Picabia laid out his man-as-machine credo about as directly as he ever would:

The machine has become more than a mere adjunct of life. It is really a part of human life… perhaps the very soul.

Almost immediately upon coming to America it flashed on me that the genius of the modern world is in machinery, and that through machinery art ought to find a most vivid expression… I have enlisted the machinery of the modern world, and introduced it into my studio.

That is the engine of the whole 1915 project, in his own voice: the machine is not a prop but a stand-in for the human, even for the soul. A few notes on the quote, because it travels in slightly different forms. The headline is sometimes shortened to “French Artists Spur on American Art,” dropping the “an”; the longer version is correct. The “soul” line is stable across sources; the second passage is sometimes chained into one continuous sentence, but in the original the “genius of the modern world is in machinery” and the later vow to reach “the pinnacle of mechanical symbolism” are separate clauses, best kept apart. And the source is the interview itself, the 1915 Tribune, not some later Dada memoir: this is Picabia speaking in the very year he drew Stieglitz.

Here is the detail that complicates any easy reading of the picture as a hatchet job: Stieglitz kept it. The drawing entered the holdings of the very man it caricatures, and when his collection was distributed after his death in 1946, this sheet came to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1949, as part of the Alfred Stieglitz Collection (accession 49.70.14). The man drawn as a stalled, broken camera owned the drawing of himself as a stalled, broken camera, and saw to it that it survived. The Met catalogues it today under a tidied short title, “Here, This Is Stieglitz Here.” (The drawing is the working layout; separate photomechanical relief-print copies of the published cover live at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, which is why you may see the work described as a “print.” The thing the Met holds, and the thing we have been looking at, is the cut-and-pasted drawing.)

So which is it: an affectionate tribute, or a takedown? The answer is that it is both at once, and the picture is built to be both. The case for satire is the one most curators make, and it is strong. The camera is broken, the lens limp, the gears in neutral, the brake on; it strains toward IDEAL and cannot reach it. Within the 291 inner circle there was a real, specific worry in 1915 that Stieglitz, for years the tireless fighter for modern art in a country that did not want it, was losing his drive. Read that way, the drawing is a gentle needle: all your faith and love, old friend, and you are parked.

But the case for homage is just as real. The thing is made of the words faith and love. It was made forStieglitz’s own magazine, by a friend and ally inside his own circle, and many accounts read it as affectionate caricature among collaborators rather than mockery from outside. The clinching fact is the provenance: Stieglitz himself owned it, which is not what a man does with an insult. The fairest reading holds the two together: this is fond ribbing of a hero’s idealism, a portrait that loves its subject and worries about him in the same deadpan breath. To insist it is only one or the other is to miss what makes it land. It is faith and love, drawn as a machine that has stalled, by someone who meant both words.