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EGO SCRIPTOR
ARMENIAN RIDDLES
I need the tempered charm Dada “smells of nothing, signifies nothing.” 3 Quoting Francis Picabia, the linguist Roman
For my ideal State / Before night Jakobson concluded, in his penetrating 1921 analysis of the Dada movement, that the paint-
Wraps round my neck er’s words could be likened to “Armenian riddles,” puzzles which, as they evolve, become
Appalling obedience utterly nonsensical and hence insolvable. There was indeed something of the “Armenian
Fools who order riddle” about Picabia. An avoidance of all explanation, a taste for cryptic language and an
Borders of madness innate defiance toward any form of analysis characterized him throughout his life, the subject
Malice / Envy of writing being no exception. At the beginning of 1920, when the literary journal Littérature
I want my own existence. was on the point of converting to Dada, and its editors Louis Aragon and André Breton asked
— Francis Picabia, “1093” 1 a few leading figures the question, Why do you write?, Picabia gave a symptomatic answer:
“I really don’t know and I hope never to know.” 4
In 1919, Tristan Tzara wrote: “A poem is no longer a formal act — subject, rhythm, sonority.” 5
The greatest poet of all is— Picabia did not await the Zürich Dadaist’s warning to create what Apollinaire in the early days
the nervous system. of 1914, perhaps more prophetically than descriptively, called his “painted poems.” 6 However,
— Paul Valéry, “Humanités” 2
we can with greater certainty set 1917, the year of the publication in Barcelona of his review
391 and of his first poetry collection Cinquante-deux miroirs (Fifty-Two Mirrors) [fig. 127], as
the beginning of an almost uninterrupted efflorescence of writing.7 This continued until the
mid-1920s, a period during which Picabia, then living in Mougins in the south of France, would
devote less time to writing without abandoning it entirely.
Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, the painter’s first wife, recalled that her husband already wrote
poetry in 1908 when the couple met, and talked of its both intimate and necessary nature.8
As an active witness and inspiration to the artist’s first endeavors around 1910 in the world of
modern art, she revealed that she herself had sometimes been urged to write, as a substitute
for Picabia: “On his request, I would often insert a few words of my own invention into his
texts.” 9 Like a shadow falling onto the written page, this particular form of dédoublement of
the author was characteristic of a large part of Picabia’s production, which we know today to
be marked by abundant visual and literary borrowings. Buffet-Picabia also remembered that
at the time of their meeting, the artist was writing “short aphorisms or poems heavily inspired
by Nietzsche.” 10 Nietzsche’s influence on Picabia, and on a whole era in general,11 would never
actually cease in the course of his life.12 During the war alone, three quotations from Ecce
Homo13 appeared in 391, presented in quotation marks but without crediting the philosopher’s
name. The title Cinquante-deux miroirs was taken from Thus Spoke Zarathoustra (“And with
fifty mirrors around you, mirrors that flattered and imitated your play of colors.” 14). “The
books we like the most / are those we never read . . . ,” 15 wrote Picabia, who seems to have read
through the literary output of his contemporaries very speedily, without dwelling upon the
work, even when it was by a close friend. Not long after Apollinaire’s death on November 9,
Fig. 127 Francis Picabia,
Cinquante-deux miroirs: 1914–1917, 1918, as Marc Lowenthal pointed out, it was memories of the man rather than the poet that
Barcelona: O. de Vilanova, 1917 Picabia evoked in his homage.16 His assumed dilettantism as a reader, to which people close
182
Il me faut l’amulette de dégel
Pour mon État idéal / Avant que la nuit
Se mette autour de mon cou [...]
EGO SCRIPTOR Frontières de folies / Méchancetés
Envies / Je veux mon existence pour moi.
— Francis Picabia, « 10931 »
183
128 129 130 131
Fig. 128 Max Stirner, L’Unique et to him would also attest, did not prevent him from critically selecting what he read. Be it
sa propriété, 5th edition, Paris: Delamain The Ego and Its Own by Max Stirner [fig. 128] and its opposition to all forms of alienation of
Boutelleau & Cie, 1922
the “unique self,” Ecce Homo [fig. 129] and The Gay Science by Nietzsche, Physique de l’amour
Fig. 129 Friedrich Nietzsche, [fig. 130] by Remy de Gourmont (from which it would be easy to take the notion of “instinct
Ecce Homo, 3rd edition, modified by the intelligence” 17 for a Picabia quote), or Le Mystérieux Docteur Cornélius by
Paris: Gallimard, 1942
Gustave Le Rouge [fig. 131]18 — these works all reflect the convictions adopted by the artist very
Fig. 130 Remy de Gourmont, Physique early on. Nietzsche’s belief in the sovereignty of the self and in a perpetual affirmation of life
de l’amour, Paris: Mercure de France, 1903 itself, or Remy de Gourmont’s recurrent theme of human relations as nothing more than a
purely amorous mechanism, run through Picabia’s entire œuvre. As for the reuse of themes
Fig. 131 Gustave Le Rouge,
Le Mystérieux Docteur Cornélius, literary from a work like Physique de l’amour (Gourmont’s most successful work, published in 1903),
feuilleton, no. 3, Paris and Lausanne: Jules Arnauld Pierre has noted that “the endeavor to eliminate the last traces of idealism passed
Tallandier, 1912–13 down from the nineteenth century” 19 and the author’s disenchanted conception of romantic
Fig. 132 Francis Picabia, relationships were in line with Picabian themes. Regarding Le Rouge, despite the absence of
Esprit de jeune fille, 1918 [cat. 576] any proven quotations, Picabia’s taste for zany anecdotes — with which he would occasionally
pepper some of his texts20 — echoes Le Rouge’s tales filled with unbelievable twists and turns
and journeys to distant lands.
A MEDICAL MARRIAGE
A few days after his leaving New York for good, Picabia wrote in 391: “Below the walls of
Barcelona/ to tear a cloud from me./ I would like to erase from my sublime life/ one thing./
The absolutely terrible weakness of my nervous flame/ Nothing manages to satisfy me
anymore.” 21 Neurasthenia, the nerve disease that struck Picabia during the First World War, is
a biographical element that had a direct impact on the process of freeing up his writing. Punc-
tuated by multiple journeys, to New York (1915 and 1917), Barcelona (1916 and 1917) and Swit-
zerland (1918 and 1919), these war and postwar years were perhaps indeed a kind of “medical
marriage,” 22 as he described it in his Poèmes et dessins de la fille née sans mère (Poems and
Drawings of a Daughter Born Without a Mother) of 1918. But this involuntary marriage with
disease became an ambiguous union, indisputably; Gabrielle Buffet was speaking from expe-
rience when she remarked upon the “complex and contradictory reasons behind Picabia’s
taste for the company of doctors.” 23 It is highly conceivable that the act of writing came to
prevail over painting during 1917–18 for medical reasons. Hence it was to a doctor of his, one
Dr. Hermann Brunnschweiler, that Picabia in 1918 dedicated a mechanical composition in ink
576 and watercolor, Esprit de jeune fille: “To Dr Brunnschweiler, despite his interdiction” [fig. 132].
MARIAGE MÉDICAL
Between 1917 and 1919, over the course of his treatments in sanatoriums and stays in hotels,
being subjected to “Swiss overfeeding,” 24 Picabia produced no fewer than nine poetic pub-
lications. These prose texts, which he published in 391 and in small brochures appearing in
rapid succession, perfectly demonstrate his “lyrical vein forever under pressure,” 25 as well as
his systematic sense of mockery. But in response to this characteristic impulse, the struc-
ture of his writings was also woven together with another and considerably longer temporal-
ity — that of war and disease. Alluding to “Bossus” (Hunchbacks), a poem published by the
artist in issue 4 of 391 [fig. 133], Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia remarked that “the texts of this genre
[were] always . . . written when Francis found himself in a state of crisis, deep depression or,
on the contrary, euphoria. Great images would come to his mind which he jotted down as
and when, without any concern for syntax or correct grammar.” 26 Constantly searching for a
place where he could somewhat forget the war and his afflicted nerves, in this poem Picabia
evoked, with autobiographical overtones, “social skillfulness,” “military minds,” “dogmas,”
and “medical marriage.” 27 Facing such abhorrent social and collective constraints, as well as
the nerve disease, the poem concluded with: “But everything is falling apart. So we must
come together.” 28
To the “inventor” of neurasthenia in the 1880s, the American neurologist George Miller
Beard, the disease was to be viewed according to a mechanistic diagram which identified the
patient’s insufficient amount of force. Using a metaphor that conjured up the modern city, he
described the patient as someone no longer able “to keep all the lamps actively burning.” 29
Dr. Ernest Dupré, who for a time had been treating Picabia in Paris before referring him to his
Zürich colleague, Dr. Brunnschweiler,30 reiterated in his book Pathologie de l’imagination et de
l’émotivité [fig. 134] that essentially, neurasthenia is “a neurosis caused by exhaustion, be it con-
stitutional or acquired, stirring up emotional disorder and worsening its manifestations. . . .” 31
In his view, “a person’s feelings have their abnormalities by lack and by excess,” indicat-
ing the possibility of an “inflated self esteem, asserting itself in egotism, autophilia, pride,
feeling superior and needing to dominate” [italics added].32 In the confined atmosphere of
Swiss sanatoriums and hotels in Lausanne, Bex, and Gstaad, neurasthenia — this “seriously
nasty disease,” 33 as Picabia called it in a letter to Tzara — became the very stuff of writing. In a
brochure entitled L’Athlète des pompes funèbres (The Mortician’s Athlete) [fig. 135], published
in November 1918 in Begnins, he apostrophized the reader, drawing on this one conviction:
“We understand each other since it is all about me . . .” 34 During the war Picabia produced an
entirely new type of autobiography, all the more cryptic as it never gave any stable informa-
tion as to the “I” who expressed it. In 391 Picabia wrote: “My sickness, a skeleton of memories/
Suddenly rises like an unbearable enemy,” 35 revealing the daily spectre of a persistent illness.
The same year, a poem published in Cinquante-deux miroirs conjured up a similar weakened
subject: “Misunderstanding that surpasses reason/ Creation of vice to a greater degree/ All in
all, I’m not taken into account . . .” 36
691 The cacodylic acid had not waited for Picabia’s large painting named L’Œil cacodylate,
signed by all his friends and exhibited at the Salon d’Automne in 1921, to see itself laden with
unusual artistic qualities: one of the Poèmes et dessins de la fille née sans mère, Picabia’s impor-
tant collection completed in Gstaad in April 1918, also bore the name of this drug. The poem
alluded to the treatment given to him by Dr. Brunnschweiler in Lausanne to relieve a painful
attack of shingles, while the famous pictorial interpretation of 1921 refers to a relapse.
As Arnauld Pierre has demonstrated,37 several inscriptions copied onto the drawings con-
ceived for this collection of poems originate in Remy de Gourmont’s Physique de l’amour
564 [fig. 130]. Thus, on a drawing such as Mammifère (Mammal), one finds inscriptions — ouistiti
(marmoset), chauves-souris (bat), l’utérus (the uterus)38 — that all come from the same
passage. This “study of the sexual instinct” among the animal species concluded, in a manner
appropriate to Picabia, with what the text implicitly said about man throughout the book, that
“Every organized animal has a master: its nervous system.” 39 But it is possible that Picabia
would have come across other sources than those indisputably borrowed from Physique
de l’amour. The prescriptions recommended in the case of neurasthenia, as reiterated by
George Miller Beard in Sexual Neurasthenia (Nervous Exhaustion) (1895) [fig. 136], can oddly
enough be found at several points in Picabia’s poetry. And, with cacodylic acid having been
137
Fig. 137 Francis Picabia,
Cantharides [cat. 563], Poèmes et
dessins de la fille née sans mère, 1918
AN IDEALISTIC FIND
Poetic value resided in the pure sonority of a term as well. Thus, cacodylate (cacodylic acid),
inserted repeatedly into his work, was a rarely used word, whose etymology from the Greek
kakôdês — meaning a bad smell43 — alluded to the prosaic, trivial dimension among those that
captured Picabia the poet. The quality or rarity of a word can also be discerned in lexemes
that occur less frequently in his poetry than the famous cacodylate . For example, rahat-
loukoums (Turkish delight)44 or zoïde (zooid)45 demonstrate a “rhythmical strangeness” 46 with
a measured effect, notably illustrated in a title like Unique Eunuque (Unique Eunuch)47 [fig. 139],
a work published in Paris in January 1920. In his Esthétique de la langue française, Remy de
Gourmont had stated that “it has been well said that the function of a word is not to define
the object but merely to awaken its image.” 48 The name was not just a pure convention, as
193
Fig. 141 Francis Picabia,
Ici, c’est ici Stieglitz,
foi et amour; printed
illustration, 291, nos. 5–6,
New York, July–August
1915
Francis Picabia could to a great extent have endorsed this profession of faith by Remy de
Gourmont: “Treat all subjects as though you were coming across them for the first time;
never accept a preconceived opinion; learn as you watch; dissociate ideas and actions; let no
construction fool you: immediately take it to pieces; have no faith whatsoever.” 65 When asked
about his creative process, Picabia, writer of the self and specialist in “Armenian riddles,”
happily resorted to his consummate art of aphorism. He might thus have answered, at any
time and in any context, that “there is nothing that can satisfy you all your life, except life
itself.” 66 As William Camfield remarked pertinently, Picabia’s responsiveness to events,
noticeable in the pages of his review 391 as in his poetry, was related to spoken language.67
For Picabia needed to aller vite, to act fast in his writing as well as in life, driven as he was by
a loathing of everything that bore the mark of effort and hard work: “ . . . I cannot stand works
that smell of a moving man, I cannot stand polished literature, waterproof literature. One
must walk barefoot and only put on one’s boots in order to enter the literary mosque.” 68
We know the solution deployed in his work: the reuse of readymade exogenous material,
the refusal, publicly expressed at all times, of any literary heritage in favor of living a life “for
himself,” an unbridled use of a poetic prose of the “nervous system,” a fundamental incom-
municability, indeed a veritable hermeticism — and even, at certain moments, a denial of
writing as an end in itself.69 Picabia’s basically anti-lyrical poetic material, taken from scien-
tific reviews, Nietzsche’s works or perhaps notes from his own medical treatment, mobi-
lizes an ego used as a hitherto unseen artistic and literary tool. Tristan Tzara expressed this
perfectly: “Picabia simply doesn’t like craftsmanship. His poems have no ending, his prose
never begins. He writes without working, presents his personality, doesn’t control his feelings.
Neither the stability of the word nor the music hold sway, and I slip on his sentences’ hidden
harmony.” 70 Digging up existing material, displacing its meaning, which is to say dislocating
it, even disarticulating it, in a kind of jump-cut specific to cinema but performed on language
itself, characterize the long commerce of Picabia with the word. The contiguity of language
and image — meaning nothing less than a precocious mode of intermediality — constituted
the basis of Picabia’s art between 1915 and about 1925, never far from the “virgin microbe” 71
called Dada, but everywhere going beyond it.