Mellon supports Camfield

Mellon supports Camfield’s interest in Picabia

BY DAWN DORSEY
Special to the Rice News

In his race against the clock to complete the definitive work on the pivotal, well-known French artist Francis Picabia, William Camfield has received aid in the form of a second Andrew W. Mellon Emeritus Fellowship.

JEFF FITLOW

William Camfield has spent a great deal of his career studying the life and work of French artist Francis Picabia. He recently received a Mellon fellowship to continue his production of a four-volume work that will include some 4,000 of Picabia’s creations.

Camfield, the Joseph and Joanna Nazro Muller Professor Emeritus of Art and Art History and a world authority on the artistic and intellectual history of the Paris Dada movement, was one of 14 national recipients of the highly competitive Mellon grant. He received the first award in 2004.

Time is of the essence because the perfect team of experts has been assembled at a small center in Paris founded by the artist’s widow. Camfield was specifically charged by Madame Picabia to produce the “catalogue raisonne,” a four-volume work that will include some 4,000 of the artist’s works.

“This is the only viable hope for a reliable catalogue raisonne,” Camfield said. “If we do not accomplish this task, either it will never be realized or it may be undertaken by a group that lacks our expertise and standards.”

Thus far, the group has established a major archive on the artist and catalogued his works to 1930. Research and cataloguing of works from 1930 to 1952 continues.

Picabia (1879-1953) first became known as a late impressionist painter, but he became a substantial figure in the movement of Cubism in 1912, a major pioneer in the first generation of abstract art in 1913, and the central artist-author-provocateur for Dada in Paris in 1919 through 1923.

His figurative art of the later 1920s and 1930s simultaneously participated in and mocked Surrealism and the conservative art of post-war France. His startlingly new modes of figurative and abstract art in the 1940s seemed to reject his previous work, and they were largely misunderstood and dismissed for at least two decades.

In addition, Picabia was a prolific poet, polemicist, scenarist, bon vivant and close friend of Gertrude Stein, Alfred Steiglitz, Marcel Duchamp and André Breton.

“Although Picabia’s work was often maligned and misunderstood during his time, a new generation started to look at him again in the 1980s,” Camfield said. “Many of the very features that had alienated him from the earlier audience for modern art made him attractive to a post-modern audience from the 1980s onward.”

Camfield, who retired from Rice in 2002, met the artist’s widow in 1962 while researching his dissertation on Picabia. He organized a large exhibition of Picabia’s work for the Guggenheim Museum in 1970, published the first full-scale study of the artist’s oeuvre in 1979 and exposed a large body of fake drawings.