Francis Picabia, Radiometers, and X-rays in 1913

Henderson, Linda Dalrymple. "Francis Picabia, Radiometers, and X-rays in 1913." The Art Bulletin 71 (Mar. 1989): 114-23.

Examines Picabia's watercolor Mechanical Expression Seen through Our Own Mechanical Expression in terms of the imagery and ideas inspired by the Crookes tube (used to produce x-rays) and the Crookes radiometer. LDH notes that the discovery of x-rays fired the public and cultural imagination well into the second decade of the 20th c.; in Picabia, they became part of his search for the invisible and for a higher reality as well as proof of the limits of human vision.