BEVERLY HILLS, CALIF.- Michael Werner Gallery, Beverly Hills is presenting Francis Picabia: Femmes, an exhibition of paintings by the French modern master Francis Picabia (b. 1879 in Paris, d. 1953 in Paris). Starting in the 1920s and extending into the 1950s, the exhibition charts the last three decades of Picabia’s career through the singular, classic, and favored subject matter of women.

Picabia famously wrote, “In order to have clean ideas, change them as often as your shirt.” Throughout his career, Picabia shifted rapidly between styles. Founding and then rejecting almost every major artistic movement of the early 20th century, paintings of women remained at the core of Picabia’s practice. Due to the long historic, academic tradition of painting the female body, women were the perfect subject matter for Picabia’s endless efforts to upend, subvert, and reinterpret modern painting.

Francis Picabia: Femmes includes masterpieces from Picabia’s many experimentations in painting, including his frenzied “Monster” series, revolutionary “Transparencies”, and proto-Pop portraits of pin-up models and actresses. Picabia’s work defies our conventional understanding of modern art. Extremely influential to succeeding generations of artists, Picabia’s oeuvre, on view in this exhibition of paintings of women, provides an alternative, more open, narrative of 20th century art.

Francis Picabia: Femmes opened to the public on Thursday 22 May and will remain on view through the summer. A catalogue with text by Dave Hickey and an “Interview with Colline” published in Journal des Arts in 1945 accompanies the exhibition. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10am to 6pm.