The predominantly ornamental character of the composition is clearly indicative of Picabia’s growing interest in drawing [...]

18 November 1922 saw the inauguration at the Galeries Dalmau in Barcelona of a show of about fifty recent works by Francis Picabia including watercolours of a mechanomorphic and geometric character, sketches in ink and graphite on paper, a few drawings on glass and half a dozen portraits of young Spanish women in traditional dress.¹ The catalogue ended with a postface by André Breton, who delivered a lecture entitled “Le caractère de l’évolution moderne et ce qui en participe” on the evening before the opening.² In it, he sought to take stock of the situation as regards the Dada movement at a time when it had reached its peak and was beginning to disintegrate and make way for the emergent Surrealist group. 

Despite Breton’s warm words, the show at the Galeries Dalmau did not obtain the hoped-for success. No works were sold and only one positive review appeared in the Spanish press. This was mainly due to the decision to mix apparently incompatible genres at the risk of making the show as a whole seem incoherent. In actual fact, Picabia was pursuing two aims, one being to undermine the false idols of Metaphysical abstraction and the other to make fun of the classicist aesthetic of the return to order.³ The artist thus appeared to depart from the cold, eroticised “machinism” of his friend Marcel Duchamp, at least formally, and to accord predominance in his compositions to a previously unknown kind of decorativism informed by De Stijl and Constructivism. While the images of Spanish women developed a cliché running from Jean-Auguste- Dominique Ingres and Édouard Manet all the way to the more prosaic forms of modern picture postcards,⁴ the mechanical contraptions were mostly drawn from the world of scientific illustrations. The models for many of the works produced between the beginning of 1918 and the end of 1922 have indeed been identified by Arnauld Pierre in a few issues of La Science et la Vie.⁵ In this, the French art historian followed the breach left open by the well-known scandal in which Picabia was involved precisely a year before the show in Barcelona. A photograph of his Les Yeux chauds,⁶ then on show in the Salon d’Automne, was published in Le Matin on 9 November 1921 beside a diagram from the same magazine (La Science et la Vie, no. 51, July-August 1920). According to the anonymous journalist, Picabia had not only drawn inspiration from the diagram but copied it line for line in his work. Openly accused of plagiarism,⁷ the artist made no attempt to deny the evidence and published a sarcastic reply in Comoedia on 23 November: “‘Picabia hasn’t invented anything, just copied.’ Well, yes. He has copied an engineer’s sketch instead of copying apples. Copying apples is something everyone can understand. Copying a turbine is stupid.”⁸ 

The prototype of Ciments, which appeared in Barcelona, is again to be found in a precise technical drawing from the same source (no. 45, June- July 1919). The illustration presents the sinuous forms of some devices used to test cement (fig. 1). Picabia repeats the soaring lines of the central element but transforms the two arms of the instrument and the rods connecting them into a simple diagram made lighter by the decorative use of colour. Despite the title in block capitals in the upper right corner asserting the relationship with the modern machine, the artist appears to disclaim any interest in its actual functioning. The device is transposed into a pure interplay of forms and the viewer is deftly kept in a state of perceptual ambiguity where the realistic observation of detail is constantly called into question by extreme simplification and the presence of deliberate mistakes. Moreover, the predominantly ornamental character of the composition is clearly indicative of Picabia’s growing interest in drawing, as attested by his work with the bookbinders Pierre Legrain and Rose Adler, whose activities are also well-documented in the Cerruti Collection (cat. p. 349; no. 85, p. 352). 

Like many other works in the collection, Ciments is closely bound up with the Turinese cultural context. Purchased from the well-known French antiques dealer Élie Fabius⁹ at the renowned auction of 1926 at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris, it arrived in Italy and appeared in Turin at the Galleria Notizie in 1969 in the exhibition Francis Picabia opere dal 1917 al 1950, curated by Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco. Five years later, now the property of the Turinese gallery owner and publisher Ippolito Simonis, it was included in the pioneering exhibition at the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna in Turin, again curated by Fagiolo, and in the major show of 1976 at the Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais in Paris. Bought at an auction in New York in 1985 for a private collection in Switzerland, Ciments has been a documented item of the Cerruti Collection since 1993.¹⁰ 

Fabio Cafagna

¹ J.-J. Lebel, “La máquina Picabia”, in Valencia-Barcelona 1995-96, pp. 40-43.

² For Breton’s postface and the documentation on the lecture, see Valencia-Barcelona 1995-96, pp. 154-157.

³ B. Fer, “Picabia’s Worldliness”, in Zurich-New York 2016-17, p. 111.

⁴ Pierre 2005, pp. 163-174.

⁵ Id. 1992.

⁶ In accordance with a practice by no means unusual for the artist, Les Yeux chauds was covered over in 1922 with a new work entitled La Feuille de vigne (London, Tate; see King et al. 2013).

⁷ Anonymous, “La turbine et le dada”, in Le Matin, Paris, 9 November 1921, p. 1; quoted in Pierre 1992, p. 257.

⁸ Picabia 1975-78, vol. II, p. 37, quoted in Pierre 1992, p. 257: “‘Picabia n’a donc rien inventé, il copie’. Eh oui, il copie l’épure d’un ingénieur au lieu de copier des pommes! Copier des pommes, c’est comprehensible pour tous, copier une turbine, c’est idiot”.

⁹ Gabet 2011.

¹⁰ The work is mentioned in the handwritten “Inventario dei mobili, dipinti, sculture, argenti, tappeti, maioliche, porcellane e oggetti d’arte che si trovano nella villa di Rivoli alla data del 30-06-1993” as present in the “Camera della madre”, or mother’s room, where it is still located (Cerruti Collection Archives).