Francis Picabia valuation
Impressionist, Cubist, Dadaist and painter of pin-up nudes, who changed course on purpose and often.
Francis Picabia was born in Paris in 1879 to a Cuban-born father and a French mother, and began as a successful painter in the manner of Sisley and Pissarro.
What a work by Francis Picabia is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Bio
Francis Picabia was born in Paris in 1879 to a Cuban-born father and a French mother, and began as a successful painter in the manner of Sisley and Pissarro. Around 1911 he joined the Puteaux group and turned to Cubism and abstraction, and in New York for the Armory Show of 1913 he became a friend of Alfred Stieglitz. With Marcel Duchamp he was central to Dada in New York, Barcelona, Zurich and Paris, making machine drawings and publishing the review 391. Through the 1920s and after he moved restlessly between manners: the Monsters, the Transparencies of overlaid figures and, in the 1940s, nudes copied from popular magazines. He died in Paris in 1953.
Because the manner changed so often, which period a picture belongs to is the first question, and the periods behave as separate markets: the Dada works and machine drawings and the Transparencies are scarce and sought, the early Impressionist landscapes are a different field, and the late nudes have been taken far more seriously since the 1980s. The Comité Picabia in Paris is preparing the catalogue raisonné and is the reference for attribution. Works on paper and ink drawings are numerous.
Gabrielle Buffet, 391 and Relâche
In 1909 Picabia married Gabrielle Buffet, a musician who later wrote about Dada and the avant-garde. Udnie and Edtaonisl, both of 1913, are among the major early abstract paintings, and in 1917 he published the first issue of 391 in Barcelona.
His ballet Relâche, with music by Erik Satie and René Clair's film Entr'acte, was staged in Paris in 1924.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
