La Feuille de vigne, 1922.
Tate
Curated by Suzanne Pagé and Gérard Audinet
By now it’s no longer audacious to turn from one Picabia, a major player in the annals of Dada, to another: the silly old artist whose late works, with their puckish anthology of reactionary, “neo” styles, once provoked outrage or embarrassment but now look like ancestral figures of postmodern hipdom. (They even launch the current Pompidou show “Cher Peintre,” an anthology of new realist painting.) This retrospective, curated by Suzanne Pagé and Gérard Audinet (with catalogue essays by, among others, Dave Hickey), presents the whole story at last, and may prove that the late Picabia was more of a Dadaist than the official one.
