ARNAULD PIERRE, FRANCIS PICABIA, LA PEINTURE SANS AURA

par Emmanuel Rubio

Rather than a classical monograph, based on biography, Arnauld Pierre proposes with his work on Picabia a "monographic essay" attempting to grasp, beyond the diversity of styles and manners, the overall coherence of the work, and to inscribe it in the broader context of the propagation of images and technical reproducibility, analyzed in Benjaminian terms of loss of "aura." He thus begins by taking up the two "foundation narratives" of Picabia's entry into painting. According to the first of these narratives, young Picabia would have copied his father's master paintings, which he would have resold without his knowledge to buy stamps. The second confronts him with his grandfather Alphonse Davanne whose consummate art of photography threatened to definitively relegate the value of painting: faced with this threat, the young painter rejects servile imitation of nature for the promotion of a truly abstract art. Arnauld Pierre shows well how these two narratives testify to a double position facing the "challenge launched by mechanical reproductions" and the loss of aura they entail: "on one hand the fake, the ironically joyful apology of a form of art entirely devalued, lost by its unavowable ends, and on the other hand, on the contrary, the defense and illustration of an excessively valued practice, of an ambitious painting that would have abandoned nothing of its prerogatives." "Two ambivalent and contradictory postures" will therefore characterize the entire course of the painter: "that of an assassin of painting, of a destroyer of aura, and that of a fierce defender of conservatory positions lost in advance," the two positions finally testifying "to the same complex of the painter in the twentieth century."

The analysis of the "impressionist" period, largely developed by our author, is revealing of this ambiguity and reveals, if not the "forger" of the Dada period, at least a "maker." While he takes up the impressionist moral of fidelity to nature, the painter indeed shamelessly copies the canvases of his masters, playing "with much ambiguity on the confusion always possible between citation, homage and the diversion of procedure" (40). Following eclectically the manners of painters from whom he borrows viewpoints, taking up again at several years' difference the motifs and atmospheres of his own paintings, mechanically declining variations of colors and hours, Picabia seems well to develop a set of conventions and procedures that bring him closer to the interested followers of impressionism, but also put him to grips with the "reproduction, finally, of his own work as well as those of others" (49). He does not hesitate moreover to transgress a major taboo, since he draws inspiration numerous times from photographic views. Arnauld Pierre does not fail to situate these multiple "original faults" of the painter in the broader context of the development of photography, and particularly of the postcard – which comes to double the viewpoints of painters until substituting for them, not forgetting the reifying reproduction of the work of art by photography. In doing so, he makes Picabia's course the proper experience of this "hypertrophy of the world of representation," induced by the success of photography, and of the "painter's complex" facing the new medium.

The passage to abstract painting, after a serious depression, appears from this point of view as the attempt to "save painting" by giving it a function radically different from the objective reproduction of reality. Passing from a stylization of the landscape of fauve type to cubist influences, Picabia, approaching Duchamp and the Puteaux group, soon testifies to the "orphic cubism" dear to Apollinaire. Besides the distancing from the objective world, the play on synesthesia, the musical reference that come to describe the search for new pictorial harmony frontally oppose mechanical reproduction, purely visual, of photography – as moreover the necessity, affirmed in New York, of translating the "impressions" of a city in perpetual movement. About the theme of dance, which characterizes some of the most beautiful paintings of the period, Arnauld Pierre interestingly recalls the synesthetic theories of Jean d'Udine – whose anagram he sees in the famous Udnie. On the theme of memory, linked to synesthesia, he also makes subtle comparisons with Benjamin's texts on the relationships between correspondences and aura. To the multiple references to music, he finally opposes the use as a foil of photography – thus confirming the rescue operated by Picabia facing the threatening pole of mechanical reproduction.

From 1913 however, that is at the summit of the orphic period, the titles of works, marked by irony, collage effects, introduce a distance. Rapidly, the intrusion of mechanical elements comes to break the all-organic movement of dancing canvases. The appropriation of the manifesto for amorphism – which Arnauld Pierre returns to Victor Méric – finally comes to cast doubt on all synesthetic theories, which the Dada period will definitively devalue. This loss of confidence in art will be increased further by the irruption of the World War. Persuaded of the death of art and aura, Picabia, from 1915, thus delivers "images that begin to recycle, in proportions hitherto unknown, those of technical reproducibility, integrated into a form of art directed against itself, stripped of all prestiges, of all inventions of painting, having renounced all demiurgy to replace it with the dryness and neutrality of tracing or copying" (125). To personal style, the painter opposes systematic borrowing from technical magazines, allying to various mechanics strongly sexualized commentaries – which come to desacralize all sentimental clichés. Arnauld Pierre convincingly relates the verbal collages of paintings to the disenchanted prose of Laforgue or Remy de Gourmont, and notes well how the desacralization of love is accompanied by a questioning by mechanism of all moral and social values – which translates for example the prose of Jésus Christ Rastaquouère. The author also shows well how the "Espagnoles" in this context, presented in 1920 and offering figures of Ingres mixed with kitsch folklore, appear as obvious fakes, and finally take up in full consciousness the "impressionist" experience of the painter to make it the open denunciation of the powers of art. In the atmosphere of the "return to order" that post-war France experiences – and to which they are too often assimilated –, they also have the advantage of ridiculing all the new nationalist and Ingresque values. Arnauld Pierre, from this point of view, describes well the radical opposition between Picabia's dadaism and the Section d'Or renovated by the "legislating cubists" – the expression is Ribemont-Dessaignes's – by returning to the Espagnoles as to the "Deux Mondes" the context that makes all their strength.

Picabia's iconoclasm, in the mid-twenties, does not lose its strength. Attacking painting in its forms – use of Ripolin or collage of refuse – as in its pious images, Picabia takes pleasure in caricaturing classical masterpieces – series of "monsters" – as well as the most sentimental postcards – series of kisses. The Transparences are however more ambiguous. Appreciated by classical amateurs of the Espagnoles, brought close to surrealist imagination (Marcel Jean sees in them the equivalent of the "salon at the bottom of a lake"), or to the astral world (with Picabia's endorsement), they seem indeed to have to re-enchant painting. Arnauld Pierre shows well however how the eclecticism of pictorial citations that composes them cannot form a true reading of art history, and proposes rather a sort of indifferent reuse – in the manner that the play of transparency superimposes without concern for scale or imbrication the various figures. Playing with an overly cluttered memory, with an indifferent recycling of the past, the Transparences open no future, and the arbitrariness of their titles – borrowed from a pocket Atlas of French butterflies – reveals the disillusioned use of a painting always at the second degree.

The eclecticism that characterizes Picabia's production just before the war only reproduces from this point of view the indifferent eclecticism of the Transparences. With the Second World War, two new periods appear however. The first, under cover of academicism, recycles images relative to naturism, then more openly erotic. Tracing images from licentious magazines, "this simulacrum painting feeds itself on simulacrum images: simulacra of love and eroticism that the sex industry is in the process of inventing, and which no longer presents but a devalued image of its subjects [...] – a prostituted image rather than an image of prostitutes" (260). As in the time of "Kisses" or dadaist mechanics, the painter undoes once again sentimental myths as well as the pictorial myth itself. With the end of the war however occurs a last reversal that brings him closer to the young generation – Goetz, Boumeester, Atlan – seeking a synthesis between surrealism and abstraction. As if tested here, not without distances – translated by the titles notably – a last attempt at re-enchantment, through recourse to primitivism, and a certain experience of matter.

One cannot, once this course is finished, say enough good about Arnauld Pierre's work. Elegant, remarkably written, subtle without obscurity, it perfectly allies the strength of its main line with the richness of analysis. It finally proposes a convincing, fascinating trajectory, which succeeds – a true tour de force – in compensating for the poverty of illustrations implied by the collection. We will only allow ourselves to make some remarks, which translate more than anything the desire to dialogue with the author of the book. It would perhaps have been desirable indeed to frontally address the question, which Arnauld Pierre treats in passing, of the patent contradiction between the perpetually announced death of painting and its perpetual continuation. The problem of the "last painting," which obviously characterizes Marcel Duchamp but also the Russian avant-garde, would have gained from being explicitly staged. For as Gérard Conio recalls well in his recent work L'Art contre les masses (L'Age d'Homme, 2003), the "last painting" is indissociable from the enlargement of art to the whole of life. At this point could thus have appeared the legend of Picabia, which the author quickly sets aside in his introduction while it can pass for being the exact reverse of the death of painting – Dada perpetually opposing life to art. We cannot neglect from this point of view, as another apparent contradiction, that to the disenchantment of art denounced by recurring mechanisms responds, for the automobile enthusiast that Picabia was, a true enjoyment of technique – as the desacralization of sex by the same mechanisms could be related to the painter's gallant life. If the "legend" has certainly proposed a portrait too cheerful of the painter, it is not certain that the painting made by our author – supported by a true knowledge of correspondence – does not turn too much to black, and this to the detriment of interpretation. To remain closest to the works, it is thus possible that Arnauld Pierre, preoccupied by the "weakness of the painter" facing technical reproducibility, has not always taken the effective measure of a context of reception that he nevertheless restores most often admirably. Nothing appears on the pleasure of mystification – the clients of the Espagnoles however did not have the learned explanations of our author – and that of provocation, more often addressed – but not as "pleasure" precisely – remains too often understood as a consequence of disenchantment while it is also at the foundation of creation. The mechanical figures of 391 receive from this taste for provocation a light – between romantic irony and a savage taste for destruction – which could have been attached to the artist's work of undermining. More generally, it is black humor and provocative enjoyment that disappear almost totally from this study. Sticking to a formula of Pierre de Massot on the "bitter and discouraged philosophy" (158) of the Dada movement, Arnauld Pierre completely neglects the extreme jubilation that emerges from Picabia's magazines as from a large part of dadaism. Now it is there the Nietzschean Picabia (the reference to the philosopher appears only for the last period) who tends to disappear. The pleasure of destroying false values, but also the enjoyment that this destruction liberates can however pass for being at the heart of the painter's course. Such an orientation would also have allowed rereading the theme of dance – the very figure for Nietzsche of the movement of the free man – and thus inscribing another intimate link between what seems to respond to a disordered movement of comings and goings toward painting – the marvelous dance of Udnie finally associating with the enjoyment of the destroyer of aura. These remarks of course do not diminish in any way the quality of Arnauld Pierre's work, which remains a remarkable synthesis, and whose reading cannot be too highly recommended.