A French painter washes up in New York
In 1915 the First World War was a year old and tearing Europe apart, and a great many of its artists were getting out. One of them was Francis Picabia (1879–1953; pronounced “pee-kah-BEE-ah”), a wealthy, restless, fast-talking French painter who had already cycled through Impressionism, Cubism, and abstraction and was looking for the next thing. He crossed the Atlantic and landed in New York, and there he found, already up and running, a small American outpost of advanced modern art. Its center of gravity was a man named Alfred Stieglitz.
Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) was a photographer, but more than that he was an impresario, the person who did more than any one else to drag American taste toward the new. He had spent years arguing that photography was a real art, and he ran a tiny, hugely influential gallery on Fifth Avenue called, simply, “291” after its street number (its full name was the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession). At 291 he showed New Yorkers their first Cézannes, their first Picassos, their first Matisses, years before any museum would touch them. He also published a companion little magazine, also called 291, a thin, beautiful, experimental thing put out by the same circle. Gallery and magazine shared a name, and both meant Stieglitz.
Around that gallery and that magazine orbited a small group of painters, writers, and collectors, the caricaturist Marius de Zayas, the writers Paul Haviland and Agnes Meyer, and now Picabia, who fit right in. This loose New York cell is what historians later called New York Dada, though the word “Dada” itself would not be coined until the Cabaret Voltaire opened in Zurich the next year, in 1916. New York’s machine-minded, deadpan version got there first, and on its own, out of the 291 circle. (Dada was the anti-art movement of the war years: it answered a civilization that had marched itself into the trenches with deliberate nonsense and a refusal to take art’s old pieties seriously.) And in the summer of 1915, for a double issue of the magazine, the circle produced a portrait of a radically new kind, the human figure thrown out altogether.
The man on the cover would be Stieglitz himself. But there would be no face on that cover, and no body. There would be a broken camera. The reason runs back through what Picabia and the circle around him had just been doing to the portrait.