About the Event
William A. Camfield, Professor of Art History Emeritus at Rice, has recently published Francis Picabia: Catalogue Raisonné Volume IV, 1940-1953 (Mercatorfonds, 2022).
To celebrate the publication of this fourth and final volume, Dr. Camfield and other principal contributors will be holding a book signing event on April 26th at the Moody Center for the Arts where Brazos Bookstore will also be on hand with copies of the book and previous volumes for purchase.
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A short slide talk about the catalogue raisonné process and illustrative works from Picabia’s oeuvre in this volume will be shown. Light refreshments will be served.
This publication, the fourth volume of an important catalogue raisonné of the work of Francis Picabia (1879–1953), includes paintings and selected drawings dating from 1940 into 1952. During the war years, while still residing in the south of France, Picabia was primarily occupied by figural subjects—multi-figure allegories, female nudes, and glamorous female “portraits”—painted in bold illusionistic relief. Notorious even in his lifetime, most of these works are now known to have adapted photographic illustrations in older “girly” magazines and other popular media.
Upon his return to Paris in the post-war period, Picabia renewed his earlier interests in abstract and sometimes non-objective art, still often drawing upon published sources ranging from prehistoric art to Nietzsche, and pursued frequent exhibition of his distinctive, constantly mutating responses to critical currents of the day. These included a series of severely reductive, subtly effective “point” or dot paintings beginning in 1949—three years before ill-health effectively ended Picabia’s half-century of artistic provocation.
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Dr. Camfield was born on October 29, 1934 in San Angelo, Texas. After receiving his BA at Princeton in 1957, he served in the U.S. Army from 1957 to 1959, and then attended Yale and received his Ph.D. in 1964. He became a Professor of Art History at the University of St. Thomas, Houston, in 1964, and stayed there for 5 years until 1969 when he moved to Rice University. He was the Joseph and Joanna Nazro Mullen Professor of Art, 1980, and he received grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEH, American Philsophical Society, and ACLS.
