Whimsical, subversive, creative genious, enfant terrible... all and none of these categories could fully describe Francis Picabia's complex personality. His Art and life were so intrinsically connected that it is fairly impossible to determine which came first: whether his Art as a projection of his life, or this latter as the reflection of his artistic perspectives. In any case, both in life and his creations he would not even bother to distinguish between intimate, public, private, trivial or serious feelings, thoughts and impulses. This obsession with searching for the most accurate and genuine way of expressing his interior state led him to some sort of race against status quo and artificially established ideas, guided by the principle: “The only way to be followed is to run faster than the others”.
In this quest for his own way of expression, during his life he flirted with many "isms", such as Impressionism, Fauvism, Futurism, Neo-Impressionism, Orphism, Cubism, Dadaism and Surrealism. Again, his revolutionary soul provoked him to battle against many of these movements the moment he realized they no longer fulfilled his needs. This was the case of Surrealism -which he later called a fabricated movement- and Dadaism. Once called "Papa Dada", in 1921 Picabia abruptedly decided to separate from the dadaists openly denouncing that the movement had become a taste, a system of established ideas, and that it had lost it capacity to shock. Apart from pointing out what he defined as mediocre, the artist added: “The Dada spirit really only existed between 1913 and 1918... In wishing to prolong it, Dada became closed... Dada, you see, was not serious... and if certain people take it seriously now, it's because it is dead!” He also added: "I was suffocating among them... I was getting terribly bored (...) One must be a nomad, pass through ideas like one passes through countries and cities.”
His fixation with machines also reveals his vision on humans (and on himself): not as rational beings, but as machines ruled by a range of compulsive hungers. Furthermore, he claimed that man had made machines in his own image; thus explaining modernity and the spirit of the industrial revolution as the natural development of mankind. Using Cubism as a resource, during his “mecanomorphic” period he abstracted machines from its usual context, using its parts as pure elements for portraiture.
Even if he was his eternal rival, the final words André Breton dedicated to him accurately describe the artist's genious: “Francis... your painting was the succession - often despairing, neronian - of the most beautiful fête that man has ever given himself. An oeuvre based on the sovereignty of caprice, on the refusal to follow, entirely based on freedom, even to displease... Only a very great aristocrat of the spirit could dare what you have dared.”