PARIS, FRANCE.- The Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris presents "Francis Picabia, Singulier Idéal," on view through March 16, 2003. The last Paris retrospective devoted to Francis Picabia (1879-1953) dates from 1976. Since then his work has been shown around the world selectively, in exhibitions focusing only on one period or another – a situation that justifies a fresh look at the oeuvre in the interests of establishing its underlying unity. This is precisely the intention of "Francis Picabia: Ideal Singularity", an exhibition coinciding with Picabia’s increasing recognition by other artists as a landmark figure. When Picabia painted "in the style" of the Impressionists in 1905-07, and when, towards 1909, he borrowed Fauvism’s use of colour (Adam and Eve), his lifelong passion for the business of painting was already clearly evident. The Picabia-Duchamp friendship begun before the First World War was quick to find its watershed, with the latter abandoning painting and the former remaining ever-faithful.

Around 1912 Cubist circles were home to a truly singular movement typified by Picabia pieces – Dances at the Spring, I See Again in Memory My Dear Udnie – Apollinaire qualified as "Orphic" because of their attempted synthesis of sensory impressions and memory.

When he went to New York for the Armory Show in 1913, Picabia was there as the sole representative of the European avant-garde. Returning to America in 1915, he developed a new visual language that took the machine as its basic point of reference: borrowing the technical precision of industrial design, he reduced the gap between the art object and mass-produced items, as in Very Rare Picture on the Earth. Among the mechanisms that served him as subject matter, sexual metaphors loomed large (Machine Turn Quickly). Duchamp was also in New York at the time, and the resultant complicity and cross-fertilisation meant that these were years of intense creative activity for Picabia, as witnessed by his many paintings and considerable literary output (see the review 391).

While Dada’s origins were partly to be found in New York, with Picabia playing a decisive part, the Dadaist explosion was generated by his initial contact with Tzara in Zurich in 1918-19. However it was in Paris a year later that their collaboration reached its high point: the Dadaist happenings of 1920, like the deliberate provocation of Picabia’s entries for the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne, triggered resounding scandals every time.

To the surprise of all Picabia broke with Dada in 1921, although without ever abjuring its spirit. After working on the ballet Relâche with Erik Satie and making the film Entr’acte with René Clair, he left Paris in 1925 to settle in Mougins, near Cannes. He then began making collages (Feathers, Vase of Flowers) and undertook his "Monsters" series, a biting, vividly coloured view of the society around him expressed in portraits of the "winter colony" in carnival costumes (Mi-Carême) or with a popular postcard feel (Le Baiser, The Kiss).

In the "Transparencies" begun in 1927-28, Picabia overlays multiple artistic references including antique sculpture, Renaissance painting and Catalan art. His titles shared this diversity, being drawn from mythology (Minos), the Bible (Salome, Judith) and the Pocket Atlas of the Butterflies of France (Atrata), just as he had earlier used the Larousse encyclopaedia (Gabrielle Buffet, Elle corrige les moeurs en riant, 1915).

From 1935 onwards his work fluctuated between a brutally austere realism (Portrait of Gertrude Stein, Fratellini the Clown) and more abstract pieces like 7091. The 1940s saw the coming of the "Nudes" series (Five Women, Nude Reading) which, in addition to making use of trashy magazines like Mon Paris and Paris Sex Appeal, highlighted the photography/painting problem that had been driving their creator since the early days of Dada.

After the war came a return to abstract/figurative fluctuation, sometimes via strangely primitive, mask-like works indicative of some deeply personal vision, and sometimes via vitalist pieces drawing on explicit sexual symbolism (Egoism).

His last series, "Points" – dramatic, moving paintings open once again to a Dadaist interpretation – are simultaneously a "full stop" (point in French) and, as in his last work, The Earth is Round, a receptive unfolding.

Comprising almost 200 works shown in a deliberately chronological way, this exhibition devoted to Francis Picabia – primarily as painter, but also as poet, pamphleteer, review editor (391, Cannibale) and scriptwriter – takes up his varied creative facets, and in particular his abundant poetic activity.

The exhibition has benefited from major international loans including, for the Dada period, Reverence (1915, The Baltimore Museum of Art), Daughter Born without a Mother (1916-1917, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh), Machine Turn Quickly (1916-1918, National Gallery of Art, Washington), Feathers (1925, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart) and, notably, Very Rare Picture on the Earth (1915, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice).

With the help of the institutions to which they belong, it has been possible to bring together the three works collectively known as "Silhouettes": The Fig Leaf (1922, Tate, London), Spanish Night (1922, Ludwig Museum, Cologne) and Animal Trainer (1923, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris).

Many works from the later series "Monsters", "Transparencies", "Nudes" and "Points" have been included in the exhibition with the generous help of collectors – many of whom, significantly, are themselves artists.