Francis Picabia: Our Heads are Round so Our Thoughts Can Change Direction (hardcover edition)

Published in conjunction with the first large-scale retrospective of Picabia's work in the United States since 1970, "Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round so Our Thoughts Can Change Direction" is a sweeping survey of the artist's profoundly innovative and influential career. Among the great modern artists of the past century, Picabia is one of the most elusive, given his extreme eclecticism and persistent acts of self-contradiction. Though known as a Dadaist, Picabia's ongoing stylistic shifts, from Impressionism to radical abstraction, from mechanical imagery to pseudo-classicism and from photo-based realism to "art informel" remain to be assessed in depth. This volume presents over 100 paintings, complemented by works on paper, publications, and film. Featuring some 500 illustrations and 14 essays, it examines the full range of Picabia's oeuvre. 368 pages.