There are two ways an artist can deal with thoughts of mortality: engage with them or distract himself with thoughts of life. Auerbach was in his early teens when he learned that his parents had died in Auschwitz; Picabia lost his mother to tuberculosis at the age of five. But the nihilistic Picabia didn’t believe in art’s capacity to salvage anything from life’s wreckage: ‘There is no destruction; there is no construction,’ he said.
