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The prodigal son of Dadaism and surrealism, Picabia led the spectacular life of a brilliant dilettante, casting in all directions his poems, paintings, scandals and witticisms. Born of a Spanish father- an attaché at the Cuban Legation- and a French mother, her enrolled in the École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in 1895, and then studied with Pissarro. He became such a skilled impressionist painter that his first exhibition of landscapes, in 1905 at Galerie Haussmann, was a triumph. Breaking his gallery ties, he turned his back on this kind of success to paint Caoutchouc (1909, Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris), thus pioneering abstraction a year before Kandinsky.