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Francis Picabia
Landscape
09.10.2026 - 18.01.2027
Villa Medici is exhibiting Francis Picabia’s “Landscape” (1909) for a period of three months in the heart of its historic rooms. The work is being presented in conjunction with the exhibition “Picabia, Opening the Doors of the Night” at the Palazzo Reale in Milan, curated by Anne Berest Picabia. This extraordinary loan to the Villa Medici highlights a decisive turning point in the history of modern art: the artist’s transition toward emerging abstraction.
Following Édouard Manet’s “The Lemon” (1880), which will be on view in 2024 in the Sala degli Elementi at Villa Medici thanks to a special loan from the Musée d’Orsay to mark the 150th anniversary of Impressionism, this fall the French Academy in Rome is hosting “Landscape” (1909) by Francis Picabia, at the invitation of Anne Berest Picabia, writer, great-granddaughter of the artist, and curator of the major Italian retrospective Picabia, Ouvrir les portes de la nuit, which will run concurrently at the Palazzo Reale in Milan from October 9 , 2026, to January 24, 2027. Produced by MADEINART and featuring over 150 works from international public and private collections, the exhibition traces the artist’s career through the prism of the night, viewed as a metaphor for existence and a privileged space for his creativity.
In 1909, then aged thirty, Picabia already enjoyed solid institutional recognition, thanks to his Post-Impressionist period. That year, however, he chose to gamble everything: he sold his earlier paintings and embarked on a radically new artistic exploration, at the boundaries of emerging abstraction. Landscape belongs precisely to that moment of sudden change and bears witness to his first experimental attempts: the forms are simplified here and the broad blocks of color already anticipate the gradual abandonment of naturalistic representation. This work in pastels was produced just before Caoutchouc [Rubber], a painting cited as one of the foundational milestones of abstract art, along with those of Kandinsky, Kupka, Malevich, and Robert Delaunay. Thus, the break in Picabia’s work in 1909, demonstrated by Landscape, ushered in one of the freest and most unpredictable career paths in the history of art.
Francis Picabia (1879-1953)
A painter and poet trained at the École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, Francis Picabia (Paris, 1879–1953) was one of the most multifaceted artistic figures of the early 20th century. Throughout his life, he explored the major artistic movements of his time—Impressionism, Cubism, Fauvism, Dadaism, and Abstraction—without ever allowing himself to be pigeonholed, creating a multifaceted body of work that defies any single definition. “To have clear ideas, you have to change them like you change your shirts,” he said.
To mark this dual announcement from Rome and Milan, Villa Medici is organizing a public event on Tuesday, October 13, 2026, featuring Anne Berest Picabia and Arnauld Pierre, an art historian, professor at Sorbonne Université, and author of seminal works on Francis Picabia. This event invites you to explore the connections between Francis Picabia and François Morellet (Cholet, 1926–2016), a master of abstraction to whom Villa Medici is also dedicating an exhibition this fall. Through the reflections of the two speakers, we will seek to explore the resonances that run through their respective artistic practices, characterized by rigor and irony. While François Morellet never ceased to champion a geometric abstraction grounded in the principles of neutrality, his work remains deeply imbued with a taste for derision, playfulness, and the absurd. All these facets invite us to reinterpret his work in light of that of Francis Picabia, of whom Morellet liked to call himself one of the “sons.”
FRANÇOIS MORELLET
13.10.2026
- Speakers: :
- Anne Berest
- Arnauld Pierre
Practical information
Opening hours
From 10.00 to 19.00 every day, last admission at 18.30.
Closed on Tuesdays.
Prices
€18 full price
€15 reduced price*
Free admission under certain conditions*
Francis Picabia’s works can only be viewed during the guided tour of the Villa Medici (duration: 1 hour and 30 minutes). You can find the tour schedule on this page.
Read this before you come
Pets, motorcycle and bicycle helmets, strollers, bulky bags, and suitcases are not permitted inside Villa Medici.
Villa Medici does not have a coat check or luggage storage on site.
Some areas of the Villa Medici are partially accessible to people with limited mobility (exhibition halls) or completely inaccessible (the M. Piccoli movie theater). If this applies to you, please check the “Accessibility and Services” section and contact us before your visit so we can make the necessary arrangements to welcome you (select “Visit the Villa”).
