Picabia'sJeune fille américaine dans l'état de nuditéand Her Friends

Abstract

Francis Picabia's enigmatic Portrait d'une jeune fille américaine dans l'état de nudité, 1915 (Fig. 1)1 captured my attention more than twenty years ago when I saw it in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. I returned to the picture repeatedly, trying to fathom the artist's intent in presenting American femininity in the guise of a spark plug. Previous writings on Picabia have done little to explain the artist's aims. In 1915, the critic of The New York Evening Sun stated without looking carefully at the work: “… Picabia has an admirable Patent Office diagram or design of a straight cylinder [sic] with bolts and washers firmly placed. It is labeled in French 'Portrait of a Nude Young American Girl.' And on part of the mechanism is printed the word 'Forever.' This may be intended to show that the young American girl is a hard, unchangeable creature without possibilities.”2 It has been referred to consistently as a generalized image of a young American girl, not a specific portrait, and most writers have followed Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia's quasi-sexual interpretation of the spark plug as a “kindler of flame.”3 George Heard Hamilton, however, saw it as a symptom of Picabia's “cynical estimate of American culture as one dominated by materialistic and technical values.”4 Although William Camfield, a leading authority on Picabia, has offered no additional explanations of the Jeune fille américaine, he has established the most widely accepted context for interpreting this work and four other “object-portraits” by Picabia that were published with it in the July–August, 1915 issue of 291 (Figs. 2–4, 9).5