The Unique Eunuch Ivy
Francis Picabia
FRANCIS PICABIA, 1920.
Starting in 1915, Francis Picabia began to paint portraits of his circle of friends as various machines and mechanical devises. Figures of the avant-garde circle became lamps, engine parts, pulleys and cameras, rendered in clinical diagrammatic lines and playful forms. By 1920, having completed hundreds of these unorthodox portraits known as Mechanomorphs, Picabia abandoned the straight edge precision and rigorous rationality of the series. Instead, the machine parts have melted down and morphed into free-form amorphous objects that resemble single cell organisms as much as they do production line objects. Rendered in metallic silver paint and slick enamel, the means of production still speak to the factory, even if the objects they depict do not. The title too moves the portraits away from the knoweable and into the fantastic imaginary, the unique eunuch an almost impossible figure of Picabia’s creation. Replete with wit as his works were, this painting also features the hallmark of Machine Co., an invented corporation that pokes fun at the natural form of the shapes on display and the overtly human hand present in their creation.