Picabia's Nietzschean Love Letters Revealed

A new book by Carole Boulbès uncovers Francis Picabia's practice of plagiarizing Nietzsche in love letters. In 1940, the 65-year-old Picabia began an affair with Suzanne Romain, a married bourgeois woman. Decades later, in 1993, Romain gave Boulbès the letters. Boulbès recognized entire passages as lifted from Nietzsche's works, including The Gay Science and Ecce Homo. Picabia copied, altered, and sometimes inverted the philosopher's texts, presenting them as his own to impress his lover. The book, published by Les presses du réel, reveals Picabia as a plagiarist who rewrote and subverted sources with characteristic humor. Boulbès, a specialist in Picabia's work, confirms that this correspondence reinforces his status as the most singular artist of the Dada and Surrealist revolutions.