Throwing the human figure out of the portrait

For as long as portraits had existed, a portrait meant a likeness. You looked at a person and you rendered them: the face, the body, the bearing, and, if you were good, something of the psychology behind the eyes. A portrait’s whole job was resemblance and inner life, the sitter’s features and the sitter’s soul, set down by the artist’s own hand. Even the most violent experiment of the years just before, the Cubist portrait of around 1910 to 1914, which shattered a sitter into facets and angles, still began from a depicted human figure. It fractured a face. Identity still lived in the features.

Picabia throws the human figure out entirely. In its place he puts a machine, a labelled mechanical diagram, lifted from a commercial advertisement and drawn in a cool, flat, impersonal engineering style. The characterizing is done not by features but by printed words (IDEAL, FOI ET AMOUR) and by how the mechanism behaves. The sitter’s soul, which a portraitist used to find in a glance, is now encoded in a limp lens and a brake left on. This is a genuine rupture. Portraiture stops being depiction and becomes something nearer to a ready-made fitted with a caption: the artist’s celebrated “hand” and “touch” replaced by borrowed catalogue line-work and a few words of lettering.

These 1915 291 mechanomorphs turn out to be founding documents of New York Dada, and they feed straight into the moves the whole movement would make: appropriating mass-produced imagery instead of inventing it, using the machine as a metaphor for the human (and, repeatedly, the erotic), letting text behave as image, and cultivating a deliberately cool, anti-expressive surface that refuses to perform sincerity. They run exactly parallel to Marcel Duchamp’s readymades of these same years, the urinal, the bottle rack, the snow shovel, ordinary manufactured objects promoted to art by an act of choice rather than of making. Picabia and Duchamp were friends and collaborators in this New York circle, working the same vein from two directions: Duchamp choosing the object whole, Picabia drawing it as a portrait.

The template they set, a person or an idea conveyed by an appropriated image and a caption, in a flat impersonal style that hides the artist’s hand, is one that Pop art and conceptual art would mine for the rest of the century. A great deal of later twentieth-century art is the working-out of the permission Picabia took here: that you could make a portrait without a face, out of found pictures and printed words, and mean every bit as much by it.