The review of this book by Jori Finkel in Art in America February 2008 follows below. If Andre Breton was the pope of Surrealism, then Francis Picabia was surely the playboy of Dada. It's not merely that he was born into the European elite, it's that he used his good fortune for such purposes as avoiding the front lines of World War I, maintaining and recuperating from his opium addiction, traveling extensively and living extravagantly. It's not just over the years he had three wives (two legal and one common-law), it's also that he had the bit of beginning one relationship before ending other, while enjoying dalliances on the side. At one point, while living in the South of France, he found his life so complicated that he had to his install new lover, his children's Swiss nanny, on his yacht in the harbor of Cannes, while his second wife remained at home.Something along the same lines could be said his art as well: the man got around. Some critics have compared Picabia to Picasso in his restless cycling through different styles of painting, Impressionism and Orphism to his trademark mechanical portraits ("mechanomorphs") of World War I and his neo-classical riffs of later years. He did more than paint and draw: his output includes colllage, stage sets, film, performance, prose, poetry and the various insults, taunts and aphorisms that give the Dada manifestos their bite.There has been no shortage of scholarship on Picabia, most recently involving a reappraisal of late paintings, which were once dismissed as kitsch. But now, for the first time, there's also an annotated, English-language volume of his prose and poetry to help fill in the picture. Translated by Marc Lowenthal, an editor at MIT Press, "I Am Beautiful Monster" brings together full texts of Picabia's most important writing: early books of poetry such as "Poemes et dessins de la fille nee sans mer" (Poems and Drawings of the Daughter Born without a Mother) of 1918 and "Pensees sans langage" (Thoughts without Language) of 1919, his art scenario for his 1924 film Entr'acte, aphorisms from journals such as 391, and assorted Dada manifestos.The volume represents about two-thirds of Picabia's collected writings, published in French by Pierre Belfond in two volumes in 1975 and 1978. It's enough material to provide a broad experience Picabia's writing, which ranges from the melancholy to the deliberately rude. It's also enough to make the translator, who has done a clear-minded job throughout, refer to his output as "logorrhea."Picabia began writing seriously in 1917, in part on the advice of his family doctor to stop painting during a bout of neurasthenia. The result was reams of experimental poems in the spirit of the day, at times recalling works by F. T. Marinetti, Blaise Cendrars and Guillaume Apollinaire in their rapid-fire profusion of urban (or martial) imagery and at times emulating Gertrude Stein's manipulation of traditional syntax.In "Oxygenated," for example, Picabia leaches words of their expected meanings through standard avant-garde techniques, from dispensing with punctuation to creating strange couplings of nouns: "Virgin of uneasy allusions / The priest flees to Tahiti / Where a heliotrope dovecote / Got me worked up in the English cigarette lectern / In my arms the huge pile / Crowned with flies / Soils his mother's tramway / The girls quench their thirst with cocktails at the scarlet down / Above his mouth."His poetry is often disconcerting, but it's rarely as truly startling as Apollinaire's or Stein's. And do not mistake Picabia for a man of letters. As Lowenthal writes, "Picabia was not merely a light reader, but even made it a point not to read at all. Looking for literary influences on his writing thus is fruitless, and any such clues to his sometimes hermetic poetry would seem by necessity to be biographical and psychological."Instead, the translator believes Picabia's influences to be much more direct-offering a compelling image of the artist as "literary pickpocket" or plagiarist. As Lowenthal documents through copious footnotes, Picabia lifted expressions from the pages of a Petit Larousse dictionary, which contains many foreign sayings. He took phrases from a 19th-century philosophical treatise by Max Stirner called The Ego and Its Own, which celebrated self-interest as the ultimate development of human behavior.Above all Picabia copied countless lines from Friedrich Nietzsche, drawn to the philosopher's rejection of Judeo-Christian ethics and his embrace of a new model of behavior based on brute strength and survival of the fittest. Picabia even wrote a long poem, the 1949 "Chi-lo-sa" (Italian for "who knows?"), by stringing together dozens of aphorisms from Nietzsche. Some were basically taken intact, such as "Pity is the virtue of prostitutes." Others were tweaked, such as "Our thoughts are the shadows of our actions," a variant of Nietzsche's "Our thoughts are the shadows of our feelings."This work hews so closely to its origin that Lowenthal won't even credit it as collage or pastiche. "Any argument for a late work such as "Chi-lo-sa" as being something of a pastiche, or a literary `collage,'" he writes, "is weakened by the fact that the material being collaged, and the style being pastiched, is consistently derived from one source: Nietzsche's "The Gay Science."But Lowenthal is skirting what may be a more powerful artistic parallel, and that is the idea of a poem as a readymade. We could identify other, perhaps more direct, connections between Picabia's visual and verbal expressions. Some of his poems share the same titles as his paintings. Some share the same theme of machine-age eroticism. (One example is the 1918 "Gear Change," which claims, "I am the factory collaborator / Who reams the cylinders of happiness.")The poems and artworks alike often represent and simulate a kind of systemic dysfunction, as if the artwork itself were a machine gone awry. This mechanical failure is evident in his most famous mechanomorphs, such as his portrait of Alfred Stieglitz as a broken bellows camera. And it is enacted in many poems, where the conventions of syntax-the very machinery or plumbing of language-are breaking down.But beyond these points of contact, the notion of appropriation may be the most powerful concept underlying both his artistic and literary practice. For as Duchamp taught us, there are different types of readymades: from the strict readymade, an object that is deftly recontextualized, to the assisted readymade, an item altered physically as part of its transformation. Picabia uses both throughout his writing-taking found language verbatim into his poems and manifestos, and also editing existing phrases to suit his purposes. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.