Sarah 10/26
Questions:
- What is the connection between the abstract, moving body of a female dancer and machinery? In a “sensual” painting with colliding “male and female elements,” what is male and what is female? Does this refer to the forms, the marks on the canvas, the movement, or the subject matter? (58)
- Who all did Picabia paint? Were any of the portraits he painted of women? Are machines part of a woman’s “soul” too, or are they inherently masculine?
- Do his images of particle reactions count as found art? Why or why not? How do they differ from or build upon the found objects we discussed earlier in the year?
Synthesized Thesis:
“The Parisian success of Dada definitely consecrated it as a revolutionary movement. But this label was soon to encompass its downfall. Dada acted on men’s minds like an ebullient, stimulating potion–it could not assume any fixed form without irremediably losing its ephemeral, mobile, imponderable virtues.” (266-267)
Picabia was at the center of a constantly evolving movement. Artists responded to social stimuli with their work, often building upon the work of those they interacted with in the movement. The community only became stagnant when it gained notoriety, at which point the artists found their very reason for creating disrupted.
