Francis Picabia was born in Paris in 1879, in a flat on rue des Petit Champs, now rue Danielle Casanova, where he died seventy-four years later. During his long career, Picabia experienced most of the artistic movements of his time. After the premature deaths of his mother and maternal grandmother, he grew up in an all-male household with his father, uncle, and grandfather, where drawing and painting seemed to be the only remedy against loneliness.
In 1895, Picabia began his studies at the École des Arts Décoratifs, where he was a student of Fernand Cormon, Ferdinand Humbert and Albert Charles Wallet. There he met, among others, Georges Braque. Four years later he made his debut at the Salon des Artistes Français with the painting Une rue aux Martigues. From 1902, influenced to landscape painting by artists Pissarro and Sisley, he turned towards Impressionism. He exhibited at the Salon d’Automne and the Salon des Indépendants, as well as at the Berthe Weill Gallery. He signed an initial contract with the prestigious Galerie Haussmann, which dedicated a first solo exhibition to him in 1905. At the time, Picabia’s Impressionism is tinged with the Symbolist turnings of the late 19th century: art is not merely the reproduction of nature, but rather the result of the artist’s own observational and emotional experience. The painter expresses a very individual experience by creating a combination of forms and colors based on a wholly personal choice.
Precisely when the artist’s notoriety seemed to stabilize, Picabia decided to turn to Abstractionism, producing a pair of drawings in 1908 and then Caoutchouc 1909. Between 1909 and 1914, he explored all the “isms” of the Avant-Garde – Fauvism, Futurism, Cubism, Orphism – in a continuous search for his own personal language. He exhibited at the 1911 Salon Printemps and Adam et Eve and he presented the following year more abstract works such as Tarantelle, Port de Naples, Danses à la Source I, La Source, Procession à Séville.
In 1913, Picabia exhibited at the Armory Show in New York four paintings made the previous year: Danses à la Source I, Procession à Séville, Paris and Souvenir d’Italie. The stay, initially thought to last two weeks, lasted six months. Picabia met the photographer Alfred Steiglitz and exhibited some watercolors at Galerie 291. The city had a defining impact on him: modern and focused on the mechanical and industrial revolution, the artist regarded New York as the only truly futurist city, where modern thinking and feeling had been embodied in the architecture and life itself. This new flurry of inspiration will lead to the creation of works such as: Danseuse étoile sur un Transatlantique, Chanson nègre and New York.
At the beginning of World War I, Picabia was sent on a mission to Cuba that he soon abandoned to return to New York. That same year, in an article published by the New York Tribune, the artist again affirmed his “mechanomorphic” interests, considering machines no longer a tool, but part of human life itself. The same year he published in the Magazine 291 edited by Galerie 291 a series of portrait-objects, such as Le portrait d’une Jeune fille américaine  and  Fille née sans mère. In 1916 he exhibited at the Modern Gallery Très rare tableau sur la terre, Machine sans nom and Voilà la femme. The following year he published his first book of poems, Cinquante-deux miroirs, and Dada magazine 391, which will last seven years and produce nineteen publications. He continued to writing during his curative stay in Switzerland:  Poèmes et dessins de la fille née sans mère, L’athlète des pompes funèbres and Râteliers platoniques.
In 1919 he joined the Dada movement in its mature French version and took every opportunity to mock and oppose any belief or ideology. Religion, nationalism, the bourgeoisie, even fellow artists. Picabia became an anti-bourgeois and an anti-communist. He wrote on Littérature, André Breton’s magazine, in the Revue Dada and simultaneously in 391. In addition, he published Pensées sans langage and exhibited at the Salon d’Automne L’enfant carburateur and Parade amoureuse, works in the mechanistic style. His fully Dada works, such as Double monde, La Sainte Vierge and Portrait de Cézanne are from 1920. In the mid-1920s, Picabia moved to the French Riviera. In 1924, the series of the Monstres caricatures subjects inspired by paintings by great masters of the past, such as Rubens, Dürer and Michelangelo. Eventually in 1927 he moved away from Dada which was seen by the artist as “a return to reason.”
Between the late 1920s and early 1930s Picabia experienced a neo-romantic “transparencies” phase. The subjects of his works are inspired by Renaissance authors such as Sandro Botticelli and Piero della Francesca, as well as classical statuary, myth and the Bible, and sometimes even just invented. Such works will be exhibited for the first time in 1928 at the Galerie Théophile Briant in Paris.
In 1930 the first retrospective of the artist’s work, 30 ans de peinture, was held by Léonce Rosenberg in Paris. In 1935 he exhibited for the first time in Chicago, presenting new works in the vein of transparencies, this time with a more allegorical and neo-classical flavor. Throughout the 1930s, the artist embarked on a journey of artistic rediscovery, revisiting various stylistic approaches from his earlier experiences. From landscapes to Fauvism and geometric abstraction, he navigated a whirlpool of creative exploration, seemingly reluctant to settle on a definitive artistic solution. In the 1940s, he turned to realism and academic painting, with works such as: Femmes au bull-dog, Femme au serpent, Montparnasse, Deux nus, Adoration du veau and Pierrot pendu. In 1945, Picabia was back in Paris. He devoted himself to an entirely personal form of abstraction and exhibited regularly in galleries and in young avant-garde salons such as the Salon des Surindépendants and the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles. He produced works such as Bal Nègre, Danger de la force, Bonheur de l’aveuglement and Kalinga. A monumental new retrospective was also organized at Galerie René Drouin in 1949: 50 ans de plaisir. In the last years of his life, encouraged by friends and driven by an insatiable curiosity he made a new series of paintings, Points, first exhibited in 1949 at the Galerie des Deux Iles. The 1950s also saw continued exhibitions in France, New York and Brussels. In 1951 he produced his last works, including Tableau vivant, Villejuif and La terre est ronde, all exhibited the following year at Galerie Colette Allendy.