I've just added a homage to Picabia to Can't Play Won't Play's myspace page. That's Mr Stephen Rowe on vocals, reading from a selection of Mr Francis Picabia's Poems and drawings of the daughter born without a mother, written in 1918 and dedicated 'to all neurological doctors in general and especially to' the three doctors who'd recently helped him with his neurasthenia and opium addiction. Picabia wrote the book after one of his doctors wouldn't let him paint cos it was interfering with the treatment too much.
My favourite line is 'That business in the local train would darken', which is a reference to Duchamp's clandestine rendezvous in a railway station with Picabia's wife Gabrielle Buffet for a few hours in August 1912. (Duchamp and Buffet would live together for a while in 1920 after Buffet gave Picabia the flick.)
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3 comments:
She was a bit of an .. uh .. moveable feast, what?
When Picabia was sick at this time, Gabrielle Buffet (his wife) wrote to Germaine Everling (his girlfriend): 'When I leave Francis alone, I am always afraid he will fall into the hands of some adventuress ... I certainly do not consider myself my husband's owner; if he prefers to live with you, I will be the last to prevent him. But I have found him ill and in an exacerbated state of nerves ... I of course haven't the slightest vocation for nursing. Besides, I have so much work! Why don't you come and keep him company every day? I imagine that we are both above the ordinary bourgeois conventions...'
Fckn swoon, what?
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