[8] A lifelong philanderer,[2] Picabia eloped to Switzerland in 1897 with one of his mistresses, causing his father to briefly cut off contact with him.

His subject matter included small churches, lanes, roofs of Paris, riverbanks, wash houses, and barges.

Other group members included Albert Gleizes, Roger de La Fresnaye, Fernand Léger and Jean Metzinger.

The wealthy Picabia was the only member of the Cubist group to personally attend the Armory Show, as the others could not afford to do so, and he also contributed four paintings.

[2] The American press was largely hostile to the show, describing it as bizarre or deviant, but Picabia was widely interviewed and discussed as the only representative of the movement available.

In 1915, Picabia again traveled to the United States en route to Cuba to buy molasses for a friend of his—the director of a sugar refinery.

Though the stopover was ostensibly meant to be a simple port of call, he decided to remain there for a while to continue working on his art.

Picabia was particularly influenced by the "machine style" of Marcel Duchamp, in which the artist used materials such as metal and glass as well as mechanical drawing implements.

[11] In this period, the magazine 291 devoted an entire issue to him, he met Man Ray, Gabrielle and Duchamp joined him, drugs and alcohol became a problem and his health declined.

[12] Later, in 1916, while in Barcelona and within a small circle of refugee artists that included Albert Gleizes and his wife Juliette Roche, Marie Laurencin, Olga Sacharoff, Robert Delaunay and Sonia Delaunay, he started his Dada periodical 391 (published by Galeries Dalmau), modeled on Stieglitz's own periodical.

In Zürich, seeking treatment for depression and suicidal impulses, he had met Tristan Tzara, whose radical ideas thrilled Picabia.

Back in Paris, and now with his mistress Germaine Everling, he was in the city of "les assises dada" where André Breton, Paul Éluard, Philippe Soupault and Louis Aragon met at Certa, a Basque bar in the Passage de l'Opera.

Picabia continued his involvement in the Dada movement through 1919 in Zürich and Paris, before breaking away from it after developing an interest in Surrealist art.

[3][2] In 1922, André Breton relaunched Littérature magazine with cover images by Picabia, to whom he gave carte blanche for each issue.

[6] From 1927 to 1930, Picabia produced his "Transparencies" series, paintings that combined images from High Renaissance art with figures from contemporary popular culture.

Shortly after, he moved to the South of France, where his work took a surprising turn: he produced a series of paintings based on the nude glamour photos in French "girlie" magazines like Paris Sex-Appeal,[17][18] in a garish style which appears to subvert traditional, academic nude painting.

[citation needed] Before the end of World War II, he returned to Paris, where he resumed abstract painting and writing poetry.

A major retrospective of Picabia's work in the United States was held in 2016 at Kunsthaus Zürich and then from 2016 to 2017 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.