Francis Picabia

Dada flared up in cities across Europe as a nihilistic expression of cultural trauma following the collective homicide of World War I. At the vanguard of the movement were Francis Picabia and the poet Paul Eluard, whose wife Gala is the subject of this work. Gala was to serve as a muse to Eluard, who made her the subject of several poems, to Max Ernst and later to the Surrealists (she would marry Salavador Dali in 1932).

Dating from the time when Dada was unleashed in France, Gala is a superb example of Picabia's 'mechanomorphism', which helped define the visual identity of Parisian Dada. It overlays abstraction, collage and readymade graphic design - typical anti-art strategies used by the Dadaists to undermine traditional orthodoxies. Amid the largely outraged critical community, some perceptive observers noted an apparent paradox in Picabia's works: André Warnod, in his review of the Salon d'Automne, noted '[i]t is strange that Picabia, who denies wanting to make a work of art, nevertheless comes, by his natural gifts, to compose a harmony of colours whose rapports are an enchantment' (A. Warnod, 'Le Salon d'Automne' in L'Avenir, Paris, 16^th October 1920). While on one level Gala is representative of Dada's attempts to subvert artistic traditions, it is also in its own right an exquisite and moving portrait of this seminal figure.

L'amoureuse
Paul Eluard

(translated by Samuel Beckett)