Udnie (Young American Girl, The Dance)
Francis Picabia (1879 to 1953) · 1913
Not currently on display. The Centre Pompidou building is closed for renovation from September 2025 until about 2030, so this work is not on view in Paris; check the museum website for where the collection is being shown. The museum's record noted it on loan to Centre Pompidou Hanwha Seoul until 4 October 2026.
Nearly three metres square, Udnie is a whirl of curved planes in flesh pink, green, grey and blue, tumbling and overlapping as if a dancer had been caught in a hundred exposures at once. There is no figure to find, only movement. Picabia painted it in 1913 after returning from New York, where he had been the only French avant garde painter to attend the Armory Show, and it records a memory from the ocean crossing: a Polish dancer named Stacia Napierkowska rehearsing on deck, watched by sailors and passengers. Udnie is her, or the feeling of her, transformed.
The painting takes the fractured planes of Cubism and sets them spinning, borrowing the energy of the Italian Futurists, but it belongs to neither movement. Look at the bulging, tube like forms that seem almost mechanical, an early sign of the machine imagery that Picabia would turn into a whole style a few years later, and at the strange title, which may be an anagram or a joke on the name of a musicologist who wrote about sound and colour. Picabia called such works painting of states of mind, and said they were music rather than pictures.
Udnie caused a sensation at the Salon d'Automne of 1913, and Picabia treated it as a manifesto of his freedom from every school. He went on to become a founder of Dada, a painter of monsters, kitsch nudes and dots, changing direction whenever anyone expected consistency. The French state bought the picture in 1948 and it has been a landmark of the museum ever since. Its enormous scale is part of its meaning; it was made to overwhelm, and even in reproduction the swirl pulls you in.
Did You Know? Picabia and his wife were the only French artists to sail to New York for the Armory Show of 1913, and the trip, not the exhibition, gave him this painting.
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