Old Trickster

Few living painters have had a fuller bag of tricks than 72-year-old Cuban-French Artist Francis Picabia. He began performing his sleight-of-hand at 15 when he copied his wealthy Cuban father's collection of Spanish paintings, replaced them one by one, and sold the originals to get money for his stamp collection. When Picabia senior finally caught up with his son, the boy got a sound thrashing, then on second thought a commendation for his cleverness. Since then Picabia has used his tricks alternately to demonstrate both his facility in art and his contempt for it.

His first one-man show, held in Paris when he was 22, was a sellout. By 1908, bored with his success as a clever conventional painter, he began experimenting. He joined the Cubists and Futurists, daubed brightly colored abstractions.

During World War I, Picabia, who had inherited his father's fortune, found his true artistic climate in the cynically irreverent Dada movement. As a Dadaist he took apart clocks and made pictures by tracing their inner organs, mounted a stuffed monkey on a board and called it Portrait of Cezanne, edited and contributed to magazines with such names as 291, 391, Cannibale.

In 1938 he played a mean trick on his own avant-garde admirers by reverting to painting gushy landscapes of Southern France, where he spent much of his time racing around in flashy motorcars or lolling aboard his yacht.

Last week Manhattan gallerygoers had evidence that old man Picabia had a new, if rather trivial, trick. Abandoning his garish pictures of expensive French real estate, he was painting wobbly-ringed dots on thick monochrome backgrounds. With three to 15 dots to a canvas, the pictures had all the monotony and none of the scientific interest of a series of astronomical photographs.

Says Picabia, who has been concentrating on dots in his Paris studio since last fall: "Ideas are like shirts. They get dirty after a while and then you have to change them." Toward serious art, he was as irreverent as ever: "I'd rather go to the Bal Tabarin than visit an art gallery. I'd rather have a seat in the Comedie-Fran-gaise than a seat in the Academe des Beaux-Arts."

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