In Search of Picabia

Last month I went to see the “Modern Antiquity” exhibit at the Getty Villa.  Visual pairings of pieces by contemporary masters and classical Greek artists/artisans were dusted off for public consumption.  As a poet, I frequently reference visual art pieces and techniques.  My thought pattern is one that generally turns from prosody to visual piece and back.  I have not found myself working from visual art to poet on very many occasions.  Perhaps only for research purposes when I studied Italian art history and sculpture as an undergraduate; I would move from a painting to a poem produced in the same region and time period as a way to culturally contextualize the visual piece.   During my visit, most foot traffic became congested around the Picasso paintings.  But it was the large-scale, dreamlike, myth-scape transparencies, or panels by Francis Picabia (1879-1953) that compelled me to stand in one spot for over 10 minutes.  I wondered where they belonged.  Originally, who did these paintings belong to besides the artist?  Not which museum or collection had loaned them to the Getty, but where were they made to hang?  The size of the panels seemed so deliberate, the order of their hanging so specific, that they functioned as visual stanzas.  I had no idea that Picabia was too a poet when I initially viewed these pieces. 

Thanks to the exhibit curators, I read on a small card that the panels were commissioned by Picabia’s art dealer as a gift to his wife and featured in the “Home” section of Vogue.  If my analysis of the photograph tells an accurate story, these panels were made to be hung in the couple’s bedroom.  Panels by a French Surrealist/Dada painter in Vogue??  In someone’s bedroom??  A quick search on my smart phone resulted in many biographies of the painter and poet.  I wondered how his poetry faired in the commercial market of France during his lifetime.  Had his poetry been translated into English? 

In fact, yes.  Marc Lowenthal translated 2/3 of Picabia’s published poetry and prose for the 2007 collection, I Am a Beautiful Monster.  It should be mentioned that I could not find any other published English translation of Picabia’s prosody.   Reviews of the collection reveal a critical consensus: that prior to Lowenthal’s translation, Picabia’s poetry and prose had been long overlooked by scholars.  A quick search of Marc Lowenthal directed me to Wakefield Press, the independent publishing house he started about 9 years ago in Cambridge, MA.  The press is dedicated to translated works, “overlooked gems, and literary oddities” according to their website.

A drive down PCH to the Getty Villa in Malibu led me to the east-coast based Wakefield Press, where there is a catalogue of intriguing reads. Here, I am bound to discover English translations of several poets I have only read about in brief references to European art movements.

I have just ordered I Am a Beautiful Monster and the exhibit publication for “Modern Antiquity,”  Modern Antiquity: Picasso, de Chirico, Léger, Picabia by Christopher Green and Jens M. Daehner.  I’m waiting for my books to arrive with more questions than I began with at the “Modern Antiquity” exhibition.  I’m on my way to discovering Picabia as a poet, but isn’t Lowenthal too a poet?  By most biographical accounts, Picabia was an inter-genre artist, working with paint, prosody, prose and drawings.  Perhaps Lowenthal has provided this student with a contemporary example of inter-genre artistry: translator of poetry, independent publisher and scholar.  Thanks to Picabia, I have a better idea about how contemporary poets, even translators of poetry, can fuse their variant creative interests.  And, I have started to explore how variant art genres can become fused by the nature of my own curiosity to search for answers. 

Here are links to some of the sites that I explored in the writing of this blog post:

http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/modern_antiquity/index.html

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11247

http://www.artbook.com/wakefield.html