Francis Picabia's art defies all attempts to affix labels to it. The artist gained attention primarily through his work with Marcel Duchamp, his contribution to the Dada movement and his widely acclaimed Dadaist collages. This book focuses for the first time upon Picabia's late work and the multi-layered, enigmatic character of his oeuvre. Here, the Dadaist, "machinistic" paintings retreat into the background in an examination of Picabia's role as a pioneer of Post-Modernism as it manifested itself in the art of the late seventies and early eighties. Picabia's opposition to Surrealism, and thus to "Modernism", dates from the thirties. Ultimately, his Bad Paintings after 1933, the post-1940 Nudes extracted from kitschy photographs and the "abstract" pictures done after 1945 bear witness to the restless, visionary approach of an artist unwilling to settle for the mandate of a particular style, who opted instead for a pleasureful, ironic and provocative pictorial language in which a changing style becomes the guiding principle of artistic and intellectual creativity. (German edition also out of print ISBN 3-7757-0701-8) The artist: Francis Picabia (Paris 1979-1953 Paris). Studies at the École des Beaux-Arts and the École des Arts Décoratifs. Member of the artist group "Section d'Or", participation in the 1913 Armory Show. Contacts in 1918/19 with the Zurich Dada group. Encounters with writers associated with the Surrealist-influenced journal "Littérature" in Paris.