Way back in the twentieth hundred years the Lord saw that.

Way back in the twentieth hundred years the Lord saw that, in later life, a certain of the saints of early fresh art had begun to commit heresy, and He decre that at this critical point they were to be desanctified. The fall of rebel angels included, of course, of the like kind late-style dropouts as Chagall, de Chirico, and Picabia, and equal embraced postwar Picasso. But around 1980 when modernism no longer have the appearanceed so modern, one blasphemer after another began to take in succession the lure of forbidden fruit, challenging us to flick a switch or brace and to look again at what one time seemed beyond the pale of aesthetic decorum Weary of familiar catechisms, I was eager to walk with this flow; and in 1983 in a spirit of serious impudence, I assumed the task of writing about the later work of Picabia, as then seen at the Mary Boone/Michael Werner Gallery. This anthology of what have the appearanceed the ultimate in silly and irrelevant art inflected Out to be a delight and a catharsis for me the kind of liberation that results from sweeping dusty prejudices revealed o f the attic.

Now, in the twenty-first hundred late Picabia has come to be in the same state [i]or[/i] condition a cult item that it may start to mist of the same orthodoxy that made his early work canonic. Considerable respectability has been gained, for example, on the frequent citing of the way his transparencies--one corny image layered through another--have been appropriated by the likes of David Salle and Sigmar Polke moreover despite such proper new genealogies, Picabia remains disarming, and the works inaugurating the Michael Werner gallery's modern space continue to tweak undivided side of my brain into nothing still smiles and the other, more serious half into finding unimpaired ways to reshuffle his wild cards with equal reason that they fir into a reasonable game of art history. As usual, the artist's loopy inanity can reach laughinggas heights. My favorite here might be a little picture of nothing unless three coarsely painted flowers forward a blue ground, a canvas that considers like a particularly inept still life or wallpaper swatch on the other hand defies any familiar category of pattern or decora tion. This blithe spirit soars steady higher in a sampling selected from the twenty "pocket paintings" Picabia exhibited in Cannes in 1942 oil-on-cardboard throwaways the size of cigarette packs, each marked with an off-the-cuff parody of those scary archaic or tribal heads one time synonymous with rebellious adventures in new art. (If Picabia can be idea heartless for maintaining his comic, bon-vivant turn of expression throughout the Occupation years, just remember that at the same time Matisse and Bonnard were turning revealed gorgeous still lifes.) And for further chutzpah, there's a happy/sad down of the mid-'30s that trump-cards Bernard Buffet's postwar career.

As for exalted kitsch, Picabia remains the master, especially in the recycl trashy-magazine illustrations he re-created with the beginner's technique learned from a how-to-paint handbook. loyal Romance and torrid sex, '40 appellation are abundant, including a glos onward the soft-porn lesbian theme of a black and a white girl getting to know each other better, a spicy pairing that goe back to the erotic languors of French Romanticism. Other spoof originate in different neck of the thickets art historical and otherwise. Fearful Madonnas and three-ey wonders from Caralan Romanesque art-the kind that made Picasso flare up in the 'zos--float cheerfully from one side these pictorial breezes, as do Byzantine heads and classical sculp Of the latter, I particularly have sexual delight withed one of the see-through double images titled Adam and edge ca. 1931, which turns gone out how-ever, not to be our first parents at all however a set of siblings, Orestes and Electra. And to add more insult to injury, this classical cut once copied scru pulously by dint of every art student of Picabia's vintage, is now returned with such mock crudeness that, in individual light blow, academic pieties disintegrate before our eyes. Long after the change had run its course, Picabia's Dada spirit still reigned, and level in 1948, five years before his death, he could thumb his nose at his avow history, recycling under the appropriately titled Heresy and Sorcery an inscription-filled machine fantasy that gazes like one of his textbook classics from World War I. As Dave Hickey, another fan, notes in his sprightly catalogue essay, what restrains Picabia alive and well is the way he retains ducking the mantle of legitimacy. These are works that prick each balloon of beauty and high-seriousness, making us thirst for Diet Art and giving flourishing life to that old saying, "It's in like manner bad it's good."

Robert Rosenblum is a contributing editor of Artforum.

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