Danger de la Force

Author: Marijke Peyser

Danger de la force is a late work by Francis Picabia. The composition is determined by a dynamic play of undulating vertical lines that move along round and amorphous forms. Lines and circles likewise make their presence felt in a number of his other paintings from that period. In December 1949 some of these late paintings were exhibited in Paris, in the Galerie des Deux-Îles and in 1950 in New York in the Rose Fried Gallery, along with a good deal of earlier work from his Dada period.^[1] The works exhibited all had impasto backgrounds, often dark, and round forms in various colours and sizes.

The forty-plus paintings with circles in the Paris gallery provoked strong criticism. One critic from the art magazine Arts spoke of a ‘nice little device’ and added that circles on one canvas were acceptable, but were ‘exasperating when repeated endlessly with a pretentious weightiness’.^[2] An American critic who saw the exhibition in Paris described the round forms as ‘points balanced on thick monochrome background … the pictures have all the monotony of astronomical photographs but none of their scientific interest’.^[3] The rather crudely painted, simple compositions were seen as works by an artist who was mocking the viewer. There was criticism of the titles too: Sa pensée est l’ombre du soleil (Her Thought Is the Shadow of the Sun) and Tableau sans avenir (Painting Without Future) were not taken seriously.^[4]

A more positive review entitled ‘The More Abstract the Better’ appeared in the American magazine Artnews. The well-known art critic Henry McBride, who saw the exhibition in New York, remarked that there were no paintings between Picabia’s Dadaist works and his recent canvases, so it was obvious that these recent paintings had to be interpreted as a return to his early Dada works.^[5] The Belgian artist and art critic Michel Seuphor came to the same conclusion in the catalogue that accompanied the exhibition in Paris. Like McBride, he saw an end point in Picabia’s monochromes. For both of them it had come full circle: Picabia had rediscovered the essence of the Dada era, with the same grace and lightness. The essence of Dada? Dada is not a style. Dada does not mean anything. It was an anarchic attitude to life vis à vis the world in which the artist lived and worked. Picabia mocked and condemned bourgeois morality with his works in an often aggressive and absurd way. The late abstracts, in which the circle played such a dominant role, were a fascinating end point in the oeuvre of an extremely shrewd artist.^[6]