A man drawn as a machine

Picabia’s signature move arrived almost the moment he reached America: he would draw people as machines. Not people surrounded by machines, not people with mechanical parts, but a portrait in which the sitter is a machine and nothing else. He did not dream the de-faced portrait up single-handedly. The Mexican caricaturist Marius de Zayas, already in the 291 circle, had since 1913 been making abstract “absolute caricatures,” rendering his subjects as arrangements of line and mathematical equation, including an abstract portrait of Stieglitz himself around 1912–13, and that example fed straight into what Picabia did next. What Picabia added was the machine: not abstraction, but a specific mechanical thing copied from an advertisement, made to stand in for a person. He called these object-portraits; art historians call them mechanomorphs (from the Greek for “machine-shaped”). For the summer 1915 double issue of 291, he made a whole suite of them, one for each of the people who ran the magazine, and put Stieglitz on the cover. The others ran inside: de Zayas as the wiring diagram of an automobile’s electrical system, the writer Paul Haviland as an unplugged portable lamp, Picabia himself as a car horn. Each machine was chosen to fit its man.

The style is the first surprise. These are not expressive, hand-wrought, soulful drawings. They are drawn cold and flat, in the deadpan manner of a commercial catalogue or a patent illustration, the clean impersonal line you would find in an advertisement or an instruction manual. Picabia even copied his machines from real ads. The source for the Stieglitz portrait is a magazine advertisement for the Vest Pocket Kodak, a popular folding camera of the day, the standard scholarly identification of where the image came from rather than a label written on the sheet. Picabia took the advertising diagram of a consumer camera and turned it into the likeness of America’s foremost champion of photography.

And the choice of which machine is the joke’s setup. Stieglitz spent his life on photography, so Picabia draws him as the tool of that life, a camera. But not a working camera. A broken one. The portrait is an argument about its sitter, made entirely in mechanical parts: a thing built for one purpose, drawn so that it can no longer perform it. The character of the man is encoded not in a face but in how his machine fails.

The object the Met holds is the working mock-up for that cover, and it tells on itself. It is a drawing and collage, not a painting and not (in the Met’s case) a print: pen and ink, graphite, and strips of printed paper cut and pasted down, with the artist’s pencil corrections still visible. It is, physically, a magazine layout caught in the act of being made, words pasted in, lines re-drawn, the seams left showing. That, too, is part of the Dada point: the picture refuses to pretend it is a precious, finished, hand-made “art object.” It admits it is assembly.