Creativity Quote by Francis Picabia

A perfect Picabia grenade: tossed with a grin, meant to detonate bourgeois certainty. "God invented concubinage, satan marriage" flips the moral script not to praise cheating or damn commitment, but to expose how arbitrary "virtue" becomes when it’s stapled to paperwork, property, and social control. Concubinage, historically, is messy, unofficial, and frankly honest about desire and power. Marriage, in the modern Western sense, is the institution that pretends to sanctify desire while quietly organizing inheritance, gender roles, and respectability. Picabia’s provocation is that the supposedly holy arrangement often produces the most human misery.

As a Dada-adjacent artist who treated slogans like ready-mades, Picabia knew the value of a blasphemous one-liner: it short-circuits debate and forces the audience to feel the scaffolding of their own assumptions. The joke works because it weaponizes religious language without needing to be religious. "God" and "satan" are less theology than branding: one label confers legitimacy, the other stigma. He swaps them to show how easily legitimacy can be reassigned.

The context matters. Picabia moved through early 20th-century Paris’s avant-garde, a world allergic to the pieties that helped lead Europe into mechanized slaughter and then tried to tidy up the ruins with propriety. The line reads as anti-sentimental modernism: distrust the institution that calls itself sacred, especially when it’s built to regulate bodies, especially women’s, while congratulating itself for doing so.