Francis Picabia’s art resists a tidy career narrative. The Milan retrospective “Picabia. Open the Gates of Night” takes that restlessness as its organizing principle, building an atmospheric portrait of the artist through desire, memory and shifting styles. The result is theatrical and often compelling, though its escape from chronology can make the work’s historical connections harder to follow.
Curated by Picabia’s great-granddaughter Anne Berest, the exhibition occupies the Palazzo Reale in low light, with galleries arranged around the feeling of a night out. Its title comes with a proposition: as Berest put it at the opening, “to know [Picabia] is… to spend the night with him.” The rooms follow that invitation into dance, erotic encounters and altered states, treating the artist’s life as a route through a dream rather than a sequence of dates.
That approach suits a painter and poet who moved among Impressionism, Fauvism, Orphism, Cubism, Machinism and Dada. Born in 1879 and active until his death in 1953, Picabia counted Marcel Duchamp, Guillaume Apollinaire, Alfred Stieglitz, Erik Satie and Gertrude Stein among his friends. His work ranges from recognizable figures to geometric abstractions, mechanical diagrams and paintings that layer borrowed imagery. Two of his aphorisms give the exhibition a useful key: “A conviction is a disease,” and “If you want to have clean ideas, change them as often as you change your shirts.”
Memory as a visual motif
The exhibition’s biographical readings are clearest in “The Spanish Night,” named for Picabia’s 1922 painting. Though raised in France, Picabia had a Spanish father and visited Seville as a child. There he saw Holy Week processions, Flamenco dancers and bullfighting. The show connects those memories to his later interest in Spanish subjects, while acknowledging the self-exoticizing quality of his adopted “Andalusian blood.”
Studies of Sevillian women, drawn in pencil and watercolor, face works in which dots echo the patterns of Flamenco dresses. That motif reappears across very different periods and forms: in an untitled 1942 image of ballet dancers and in the geometric painting Symbole (1950). Photographs of Andalusian buildings from the Picabia Family Archive, with their arches and latticework, are set alongside Salicis (1929), from the “Transparencies” series. Its overlapping images suggest the layered exposure of a photograph.
The associations give the galleries a sense of visual discovery, but they also show the limits of organizing Picabia through personal memory. A recurring shape can connect works across decades; the connection doesn’t necessarily explain how his practice changed over time.
Desire, biography and the missing timeline
“Love Parade,” a title borrowed from Picabia’s 1917 mechanomorphic painting, links his sexual appetite to childhood loss. Picabia’s mother died when he was seven. In their 2017 book Gabriële, Berest and her sister Claire describe his adolescence in a household shared with his father, grandfather and uncle. The family nickname “les Quatre sans femme” (“the Four without a Woman”) could also be heard as “les quatre cents femmes” (“the Four Hundred Women”), a pun that the book connects to his many lovers.
The show treats eroticism as a force in the work as well as in the artist’s life. Mechanical sketches recall Duchamp’s bachelor machines; Woman with the Bull (1940–41) combines found images of pin-up models. The “Transparencies,” too, receive a biographical reading: they emerged during a period when Picabia, in the exhibition’s phrasing, “lived through multiple loves simultaneously.”
There’s a risk in making the artist the exhibition’s main revelation. The wall texts repeatedly suggest that “every portrait is a self portrait,” and the galleries encourage viewers to read Picabia’s changing images as clues to his personality. That can be an inviting way into the work. Yet the decision to “escape chronology,” as Berest describes it, scatters the histories of individual bodies of work—including the “Transparencies”—across the galleries. The installation favors mood and connection over a clear account of artistic development.
Berest has positioned the retrospective for a “new generation,” and the installation leans into that aim. Sparkling lights, funhouse mirrors and a peep show featuring some of Picabia’s more lascivious drawings turn the Palazzo Reale into a stage. The effect recalls the elaborate parties Picabia organized on the French Riviera in the 1930s, including “Une nuit à Singapore,” with zoo animals, and “Un soir au Palm-Beach,” with potted palms.
The exhibition’s strongest claim is that Picabia’s continual shifts still speak to viewers who value personal experience over a fixed art historical story. Its theatrical setting makes that case vividly. The trade-off is clear: visitors get an intimate, unsettled encounter with the artist, while the larger arc of his work remains for them to piece together.
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