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.

Picabia is everywhere in 391: his artworks adorn most of the covers, and his poems, doodles, and aphorisms fill its pages — often quite literally. Many of the great artists and writers of the time also contributed: Louis Aragon, Hans Arp, Robert Desnos, Paul Éluard, Max Jacob, and Philippe Soupault, to name a few. While most issues are just a few pages long, they contain no shortage of curiosities: a calligramme by Guillaume Apollinaire, a redacted poem by Man Ray that constitutes an early precursor to erasure poetics, and a full-page parody of an advertising spread by Tristan Tzara. There are satirical gossip columns bearing news from the literary world, scathing art criticism, silly jokes, and typographic flourishes. Text is presented vertically, horizontally, upside down — usually in French, but sometimes in English and occasionally in Spanish or Latin, too.

In the image of its maker, 391 is in turns provocative and playful, caustic and creative, international in outlook with a propensity for navel-gazing. Above all, it is exuberantly nihilistic, adopting a scorched earth policy to art and society, good taste and sound morals — just about anything that falls under its contributors’ gaze.

This is particularly true of the twelfth issue, where the review’s Dada inclination is most explicit. Published in March 1920, it features Duchamp’s moustachioed Mona Lisa on the cover, and beneath that, Picabia’s Manifeste DADA. Like other Dada manifestos of the time, it is characteristically piecemeal, a non-exhaustive list, part way between dialogue and prose poem, setting out what Dada isn’t. It takes shots at money-hungry art dealers, Cubism (a “famine of ideas”), and — why not? — art itself (“a pharmaceutical product for imbeciles”). What does Dada propose in its place?

Dada itself wants nothing, nothing, nothing, it's doing something so that the public can say: “We understand nothing, nothing, nothing.”
“The Dadaists are nothing, nothing, nothing, they will certainly come to nothing, nothing, nothing.”

Francis PICABIA
who knows nothing, nothing, nothing.

This anarchic, iconoclastic bent continues in the ensuing pages, with a portrait of the Virgin Mary, here reduced to a blot of spilt ink. Anti-religious, anti-pictorial, anti-aesthetic, the gesture is one of renunciation, but it also foregrounds the act of creation and the element of chance intrinsic to all art, not least to the performances of the Dadaists now converging in Paris.

Indeed, when this twelfth issue was published, Picabia had returned from his wartime exile abroad and was back in the French capital, where he met André Breton for the first time. Tristan Tzara had arrived from Zurich, welcomed “like a Messiah.” Together, they attended the inaugural Friday soirée for the review Littérature, where Tzara read out Poème (a newspaper article), with Éluard providing an accompanying soundtrack on the bells. Picabia did a drawing on a chalkboard which Breton erased as the picture progressed.

In the postwar years, Paris became the scene of frenetic creative activity: poems were read in the dark or under umbrellas in the rain, eggs were pelted at performers and insults at audiences in ever-more chaotic “happenings”. Breton, meanwhile, was trying to model Dada on a political movement, holding meetings with official minutes, conferences with organising committees, even trials of literary opponents. Dada, in Breton’s vision of it, would stage its own coup d’état, like a military junta seizing power. The battleground that ensued nurtured a proliferation of rival factions, some convinced of the necessity of establishing the tenants of a movement, of setting out its theoretical underpinnings, its values and its goals. For others, this went against everything that Dada stood for: “Dada means nothing”, says Tzara, to which Picabia responds, “nothing, nothing, nothing”.

It was only a matter of time before Picabia the Prankster, Picabia who is resolutely anti-tout, would turn on Dada, too. In 1921, he renounced the movement. And it wasn’t long before Breton was shepherding Dada’s remaining disciples in a new direction, as evidenced in the pages of Littérature, which he was now editing. A new term was being floated, coined by Apollinaire several years earlier: Surrealism.

In May 1924, Picabia revived 391 after a three-year hiatus. Daubed across the cover in large lettering is the neologism SUPERRÉALISME. The remaining three pages are given over to lewd drawings depicting a “Rimbaud thermometer” inserted into various orifices — a clear dig at the emerging Surrealists and their nineteenth-century idol.

Breton wasn’t thrilled about this development. We know this because he sent a letter to Picabia privately expressing his displeasure, which Picabia dutifully published in the next issue of 391, under the heading, “A letter from my grandfather”. Beneath the reprinted correspondence, Picabia provides a curt reply: “When I’ve smoked my cigarettes, I’m not in the habit of keeping the butts.”

The public airing of grievances continues in the next and final issue of 391. Published in October 1924, the same month as Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto, Picabia describes Surrealism as “Dada disguised as an advertising balloon for the house of Breton & Co.”, and Breton as “an actor who wants all the leading roles in the theatre of illusionists . . . he is merely the Robert Houdin of provincial hotels!” He signs off, “Francis Picabia, stage director for André Breton’s Surrealism”, with the warning, “To be continued should the need arise.”

The need didn’t arise. Picabia would soon withdraw from the Paris arts scene to the South of France, determining there were better uses of his time than literary feuds, despite his abundant talent for them.

Beyond the in-fighting, the final issue of 391 goes out with a poignant parting shot. On its front cover, Picabia announces a new artistic endeavour, complete with an “ism” and a manifesto. While clearly a parody of the fate of the Dada movement and its Surrealist progeny, it also serves as something of a credo:

INSTANTANISM: DOES NOT WANT YESTERDAY.
INSTANTANISM: DOES NOT WANT TOMORROW. . . .
INSTANTANISM: DOES NOT WANT GREAT MEN.
INSTANTANISM: BELIEVES ONLY IN TODAY.
INSTANTANISM: WANTS FREEDOM FOR ALL.
INSTANTANISM: BELIEVES ONLY IN LIFE.
INSTANTANISM: BELIEVES ONLY IN PERPETUAL MOTION.

Here begins and ends the instantism movement — and fittingly so. Turn the cover sideways, and the reader can decipher a phrase that surmises Picabia’s attitude toward the organising impulse of art’s protagonists, while venturing a rare affirmation of what he believes creative practice to be:

IT IS NOT A MOVEMENT
IT IS PERPETUAL MOVEMENT!