La Poésie Est Comme Lui. Voila Haviland
Francis Picabia
FRANCIS PICABIA, 1915. MIXED MEDIA ON BOARD.
Dada was raging, the machines were taking over, and Francis Picabia was amongst the most celebrated artists in the world. Automation, industrialization and war were in the air, and the avant-garde responded with the embrace of nonsense. In precarious times, why pay any attention to logic, reason, or the accepted philosophies of the day when they had led to nothing but pain and strife? It was in this epoch that Picabia began his ‘mechanical drawings’, inspired equally by the machine like works of Duchamp as he was by the military illustrations of weaponry, he drew works of aesthetic rigidity, seemingly educational at first glance, but which fell apart into surreal irrationality with any close inspection. This work is from a series of portraits depicting his friends as various mechanical objects. Here, the photographer and critic Paul Haviland is shown as a desk lamp, disconnected from his power source as he left New York to look after his father. The translation of Picabia’s fittingly absurd title is simple: ‘Poetry is like him. Here is Haviland’