Francis Picabia was a French artist and major figure of the Dada movement. Chameleon like in his ability to shift through aesthetic models, Picabia left a blueprint for future iconoclastic painters, including Sigmar Polke. “What I like is to invent, to imagine, to make myself at every moment a new man, and then, to forget him, forget everything,” he once said. Born on January 22, 1879 in Paris, France to Cuban-Spanish father and a French mother, he was raised in an affluent setting. Picabia went on to attend the École des Arts Decoratifs alongside notable classmates Marie Laurencin and Georges Braque. Throughout the following decades, he employed a number of styles, including Impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism. A radical display of Cubism, ...