Negro Song I

Francis Picabia French

Not on view

Over the course of his nearly fifty-year career, the protean avant-garde artist Francis Picabia hopscotched across modernist styles and genres, from geometric abstraction to pseudo-classicism, and from painting to poetry and film. Though he remains closely associated with Dada, he drew on the pictorial innovations of Cubism in the early 1910s to paint dynamic arrangements of abstract fragments in jewel-like color.

Initially active in Paris, Picabia sought refuge in New York City as World War I raged in Europe. He arrived in January 1913, just after the opening of the legendary International Exhibition of Modern Art, known as the Armory Show, in which he exhibited several paintings. The city was a source of deep inspiration for Picabia, who proclaimed that he would make a new series of works to "express the spirit of New York as I feel it, and the crowded streets of your city as I feel them, their surging, their unrest, their commercialism, and their atmospheric charm." Within weeks of arriving, he had produced a number of watercolors capturing the energy and noise of the city, this one among them.


Negro Song I　responds to Picabia’s experience at a Harlem cabaret, where he heard the vocal improvisations of a Black jazz singer. The artist translated that musical dynamism into a visual vocabulary of geometric shapes, accumulated in the center of the sheet and rendered in deep-toned hues of brown and purple. (Picabia made a synesthetic claim for purple as "the inevitable and dominant hue" resulting from the song he had heard).


Soon after completing his New York watercolors, Picabia received his first solo exhibition in the United States at 291, the gallery run by artist and dealer Alfred Stieglitz in midtown Manhattan. The show opened on March 17, 1913, two days after the close of the Armory Show. Among the works presented were two watercolors made in reaction to African American music, both exhibited with the title　Negro Song. These incorporate a now outdated and derogatory term to denote persons of Black African heritage, though it was common at the time. That Picabia visited Harlem, then made and exhibited these works in a matter of weeks owes to his chosen medium of watercolor. Inexpensive, quick-drying, and fluid, it allowed for more direct expression in comparison to oil paint. The counterpart to this sheet, Negro Song II, is also held in The Met collection.

Negro Song I, Francis Picabia (French, Paris 1879–1953 Paris), Watercolor and graphite on paperboard

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