Machine And Inhuman: A Study On Francis Picabia’s Mechanomorphic Paintings

At the beginning of the twentieth century,with the completion of the Second Industrial Revolution and the rapid development of the capitalist economy,machinery became an indispensable part of daily life and production.However,the advent of World War I destroyed the optimistic cult of machines and technology and gave rise to more complex and contradictory emotions.Between 1915 and 1922,the French artist Francis Picabia created a large number of mechanomorphic paintings,in which the images of machines were either appropriated from advertisements and digram of mechanical products,or were purely fantasy products,and their subjects were closely related to the artist’s personal life and the process of society,and their style and content were strongly personal and marked by the times.This paper takes Picabia’s mechanomorphic paintings as the object of study,and through image analysis and intertextual evidence,explores the patterns of Picabia’s mechanomorphic paintings’ image composition,the reasons for their emergence and the connotations they express.First,given an overall introduction to Picabia’s mechanomorphic paintings,sorting out the creative paths and stylistic transformations in relation to the background of the times,the artist’s personal life and his works.Then,the works are pictorially analyzed in three types: machine portrait,machine allegory and erotic machine,and the pictorial composition patterns and connotations of the different types of mechanical form paintings are analyzed in the context of the works’ creation,related texts and pictorial sources,to determine that they correspond to the three themes of concrete human beings,human concepts and human emotions respectively—the machine portrait transform concrete human personalities,experiences and spiritual concepts into mechanical forms by equating them with the functions and operating states of machines through symbolic techniques;the machine allegory depict abstract concepts of human beings,and there is no direct connection between their mechanical forms and their deeper connotations,and the allegories are constituted through multiple translations of images and textual symbols;the erotic machine,converts human union into the operation of a machine,where human eroticism is equated with the mechanism of mechanical operation,this type of mechanomorphic painting closely associated with Duchamp’s The Great Glass and related notes.Although these mechanomorphic paintings are inspired by modern mechanical processes and their images present purely mechanical artifacts,his affirmation of the machine is at its symbolic function,where the machine can reproduce all the facets of the human world—man,in fact,is the actual subject of Picabia’s mechanomorphic painting.However,all human elements were depicted in the picture.This kind of mechanomorphic painting,which depicts all aspects of human beings with purely inhuman machines,shows a paradox of human and inhuman.This paradox is rooted in the connotation and origin of mechanical forms,which is Picabia’s desire for indefinity-the indefinity of modern life is two-sided,making people yearn for change and transcendence,while at the same time making them uneasy about the unknown and nostalgic for the past.It is in the tension between the human and the inhuman,the old and the new,that Picabia’s mechanomorphic paintings are born.