Francis Picabia and the Art of the Signature

Photo: “Untitled Signature” by Francis Picabia

The year was 1915, when a thirty-six-year-old Francis Picabia showed up to the New York Dada scene. His alibi to leave Europe was a story about his travels to Cuba in order to purchase molasses, a story he cleverly forgot once he arrived in New York.

Picabia, like many of the Dadaists, sought exile from war-torn Europe in New York City and Zurich. In an apartment on West 67th Street, rounds of parties and gatherings created, according to Picabia’s first wife, Gabrièlle Buffet-Picabia, “an atmosphere entirely free from conventions and social prejudices.”

Picabia went on to challenge mechanization and how it threatened to turn men into robots, and satirized this concept in the piece, “Very Rare Picture upon the Earth”(1915). He even dabbled and worked on collages, his most memorable work being, “L'Oeil Cacodylate”, or “The Cacodylic Eye”(1921).

There is one piece of intrigue that has made its ways into frames hung up on museum walls and that is Francis Picabia’s “Untitled Signature” (pictured above), which is a fancifully cursive signature of Francis Picabia’s first and last name, with a smaller version of his name (in print) on the bottom-right corner. In the unconventional, convention of the Dada Movement, this piece brings attention to the purpose of the artist signature—a visible signature—in a work of art.

Webcomic creators make use of the signature in many forms. There are full-page visible watermarks stretched across the page, hidden signatures that blend into the backgrounds or character designs, and some comics where the creator’s signature combined a copyright symbol and year fits into the third panel. Francis Picabia picked up on the importance of the signature, likely by noticing how loosely the Impressionists used them in their works.

Signatures do little in the struggle of separating the art from the artist, they do the opposite. It is very humorous, an artist’s signature as the main focus of an artwork is a complete removal of the art from the artist.


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