Francis Picabia, Spanish Night, 1922.
Enamel and oil on canvas. 160 x 130 cm. Museum Ludwig, Cologne.

‘Francis Picabia and the Pudica Pose: Spanish Night (1922) and the Legacies of Classicism.’

Speaker: Simon Marginson

In the 1920s, the avant-garde artist Francis Picabia began to incorporate classical motifs into his paintings. Critics maintain that this move is formally and politically reactionary, while champions detect a critically ironic at play. Spanish Night (1922), they argue, attacks Ingres and French neo-classicism specifically, and the ‘classical body’ more generally.

Sceptical of the abstraction ‘classical body’ and wary of the rhetoric of negation, this paper proposes a new reading of the painting. Situating Spanish Night within the tradition of the Venus pudica, it argues that the full extent of Picabia’s classicising allusions has yet to be recognised. A consideration of competing period notions of classicism then helps bring out Picabia’s ambivalent engagement with its legacies. Drawing on Apollinare’s distinction between a fake and true classicism, Picabia’s self-consciously fake classicism is shown to stake paradoxically a claim to being the authentic continuation of the tradition. Spanish Night, it emerges, was always as much about the selective continuation of the classical as its ironic negation.