Perpetual Movement: Francis Picabia’s 391 Review (1917–1924)

Francis Picabia, like his close friend and collaborator Marcel Duchamp, was a man of many names. While Duchamp famously went by his feminine alter ego Rrose Sélavy and signed his 1917 Fountain with the pseudonym R. Mutt, Picabia adopted numerous aliases across his literary and artistic practice. When he wasn’t Pharamousse, he was Funny Guy. Picabia le Loustic (Picabia, the Prankster) in his lighter moments, and Francis le Raté (Francis the Failure) in his lower ones. Why have one name when he could have several? And what’s in a name, if not a straitjacket, a rigid signifier assigned at birth, signalling the bearer’s initiation into the tyrannical regime of language?

Picabia’s capricious approach to proper nouns extended to the many “-isms” that characterised the period in which he worked: no sooner had he hoisted the banner of one movement, than he had cast it off altogether, wriggling free before what we might call the three “c”s — convention, codification, and collectivism — impinged on his individual creative freedom.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in 391, the arts review that Picabia created in Barcelona in 1917 and proceeded to publish, over the course of seven years, from New York, Zurich, and Paris. Its nineteen issues chart his brief but vital contribution to Dada, his brush with Surrealism and subsequent break with it, accompanied by a suitably extravagant bust-up with the movement’s ringleader, André Breton.

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