Gabrièle Buffet-Picabia - Infinite Women

This bio has been republished from Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde. See below for full attribution.

Born: 21 November 1881, France
Died: 7 December 1985
Country most active: France
Also known as: Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia

Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia might be the most quoted witness of the Dada movement, yet she is one of the least studied. Her name is most often found in the footnotes of books, next to citations for her detailed comments and stories on the charismatic male leaders of the Dada movement.
She was born in France in 1881 and grew up with musical aspirations. She attended Schola Cantorum, a “liberal” and “controversial center of music in France,” directed by Vincent d’Indy. While she was studying and practicing music, d’Indy inspired her to practice non-traditional forms of music, which she carried into her writing and art criticism later in life (Kamenish 39).
Gabrielle Buffet met Francis Picabia in 1908 and they were married in 1909 (Camfield 14-15). Buffet influenced and encouraged Picabia’s desire to produce more imaginative, reflective, and abstract art. In 1909, not long after the Picabias married, they met Marcel Duchamp (Camfield 20-21), with whom they developed a lifelong artistic and personal relationship. Buffet credits the two men with inventing Dada and labeled “the New York circle of artists ‘pre-Dada’” (Kamenish 40).
Scholars value Buffet most for her unbiased and unselfish analysis of the period, as well as for her “experimental prose and verse” (Kamenish 47). Buffet’s writing embodies “the teasing spirit of Dada” (Kamenish 46), especially in pieces like her “Petit Manifeste.” Additionally, in two of her essays, “Arthur Cravan and American Dada” and “Some memories of Pre-Dada: Picabia and Duchamp,” Buffet reflects the ambiguity and playfulness that characterized Dada. Both of these essays end without a solid conclusion, and the fate of the subject of each is also left uncertain.
Often the social atmosphere of the avant-garde and Dada movement involved large gatherings of people and drinking, especially at the Arensberg apartment; this is most likely where Buffet and Mina Loy first met (Burke 213). Many avant-garde artists and writers gathered at the home of Louise and Walter Arensberg in New York. Buffet and Picabia first attended Arensberg’s apartment as guests of Duchamp. Here Buffet became acquainted with Mina Loy and other artists including Arthur Cravan, Germaine Everling (Picabia’s mistress), Albert Gleizes and wife Juliette Gleizes, Man Ray, and many more (Kamenish 41, 52).
In Loy, Buffet found someone who also questioned Duchamp’s intentions in his scandalous and harsh remarks about women (Burke 217). Ironically, their opinion of a different man, Arthur Cravan, with whom Loy had a romantic relationship, ended any friendship they had. After Buffet “published a memoir of Cravan that was largely complimentary but expressed doubt about the reasons for his disappearance,” Mina ended their relationship (Burke 381).
In Buffet’s later years, she participated in the French Resistance and sheltered Allied parachutists, escaped prisoners of war, and hid documents for the Belgian secret service (Kamenish 51). Despite her political passions later in life, Buffet remains to be praised for her “invaluable reflections on the rise and spread of the avant-garde on both continents” (Kamenish 38). Her work is successful in providing professors, students, and scholars the world over a window into the social, cultural, and political world of primary figures of the Dada movement.