Description

The MIT Press [Published Date: 2010]. Soft cover, 476 pp. In very good condition, with light bumping and creasing to edges and corners of cover and light overall scuffing. Binding tight. Pages clean and unmarked. NOT Ex-Library. NO remainder marks. This volume presents a study of the French artist and writer Francis Picabia (1879-1953). The author focuses on Picabia's work in Paris during the Dada years. He describes a series of nearly forgotten objects and events, from the almost lunatic range of the Paris Dada "manifestations" to Picabia's polemical writings; from a lost work by Picabia in the form of a hole (called, suggestively, The Young Girl) to his "painting" Cacodylic Eye, covered in autographs by luminaries ranging from Ezra Pound to Fatty Arbuckle. Baker ends with readymades in prose: a vast interweaving of citations and quotations that converge to create a heated conversation among Picabia, André Breton, Tristan Tzara, James Joyce, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and others