Francis Picabia

"Pour que vous aimiez quelque chose il faut que vous layez vu et entendu depuis longtemps tas didiots."

"The Cubists want to cover Dada with snow; that may surprise you, but it is so, they want to empty the snow from their pipe to bury DaDa. Are you sure? Positively sure, the facts are revealed by grotesque mouths. They think that Dada can prevent them from practicing this odious trade: Selling art expensively. Art costs more than sausages, more than women, more than everything. Art is visible like God (see Saint-Sulpice). Art is a pharmaceutical product for imbeciles. The table turns thanks to spirit; the paintings and other works of arts are like strong-box tables, the spirit is inside and becomes more and more inspired according to the auction prices. Farce, farce, farce, farce, farce, my dear friends."

"FRANCIS PICABIA is an imbecile, an idiot, a pickpocket!!! 1921 BUT He saved Arp from constipation! The first mechanical work was created by madam Tzara the Day she put little Tristan into the world, however she didnt know it funny girl Francis Picabia is an imbecilic Spanish professor who has never been dada FRANCIS PICABIA IS NOTHING FRANCIS PICABIS likes the morality of idiots Arps binocle is Tristan’s testicle FRANCIS PICABIS IS NOTHING!!!!!!!!!! But Arp was Dada before Dada."

"Picabia felt.. ..that the machine had accomplished its conquest of man.. ..that his diagrams had ceased to inflame the anger of the bourgeois.. ..The Eiffel Tower whose unaesthetic carcass had offered material for so many controversies.. ..was now part of the Parisian landscape. This is why new elements appeared in the painters work from 1919: collage, the use of solid objects, materials reputed to be non-artistic, like [the use of] Ripolin paint."

"One does something for six months, a year, and one goes on to something else. Thats what Picabia did all his life."

"So Picabia has invented nothing, he just copies. But of course, Picabia copies an engineers sketch instead of copying apples. Copying apples is something everybody understands, copying a turbine is stupid"

"For thirty days and thirty nights he remained in a lamentable state.. ..the doctor.. ..to relieve the pain prescribed granulated aconitine, a drug with which it is difficult to get the dosage right and possessing effects that vary according to the patient’s temperament. The doctor warned us to pay great attention to whatever symptoms it might produce and Picabia, apprehensive as always, developed a superstitious fear of the little box, though at the same time attracted by the relief it gave him."

"Naturally, form has come to take precedence over color with me, though when I began painting color predominated. Slowly artistic evolution carried from color to form and while I still employ color, of course, it is the drawing which assumes the place of first importance in my pictures."

"These two pieces [The Cacodylic Eye and Hot Eyes] gave rise to more talk than all the other works in the Salon [in Paris, 1921] put together. Here was a fresh paradox: as Francis Picabias position became more and more definitely independent of the [[w:Dada|Dada group, his personality continued to be more undeniably and obviously the most radically Dadaist of them all."

"Picabia, who at first extracted a profuse plastic inspiration from machines, adopts thereafter [after World War 1.] aspects which are directly photographic; but emptied of their utilitarian signification, Picabia charges them with a new reality, of which he alone is the arbiter, creating an atmosphere of migration which surrealism systematised."

"We [ Tristan Tzara and Jean Arp ] found him [Picabia in 1919, in his hotel in Zürich] busy dissecting an alarm-clock.. .Ruthlessly he slashed away at his alarm-clock down to the spring, which he pulled out triumphantly.. ..and soon impressed the wheels, the spring, the hands and other secret parts of the clock on pieces of paper. He tied these impressions together with lines and accompanied the drawing with comments of a rare wit far removed from the world of mechanical stupidity. He was creating antimechanical machines.. ..machines of the unconsciousness.."

"It is not a recognisable scene [his two paintings Dances at the spring, 1912 - Picabia painted the motion and the excitement of a peasant dance while he was on his honeymoon in the countryside of Italy; one version is lost]. There is no dancer, no spring, no light, no perspective, nothing other than the visible clue of the sentiments I am trying to express.. .I would draw your attention to a song of colours, which will bring out for others the joyful sensations and feelings inspired in me on those summer days when I found myself somewhere in the country near the Italian border, where there was a spring in a wonderful garden. A photograph of that spring and that garden would in now way look like my painting Dance at a spring I was shown for the first time at the w:Salon dAutomne in Paris in 1912."