Stieglitz's 291 opened Recent Paintings by Francis Picabia on January 12, 1915, a short exhibition that ran through January 26. Picabia had already appeared in the orbit of the Armory Show and was moving through Cubism, abstraction, and the irreverent visual language that would soon connect him to Dada. The New York setting mattered: 291 was a compact but influential forum where European avant-garde art, experimental photography, and American modernism met before larger museums gave such work sustained attention. The Picabia exhibition also sits just before the launch of the magazine 291 in March 1915 and before Picabia's later periodical 391, whose title explicitly echoed Stieglitz's gallery.
The show helped place Picabia inside the New York avant-garde network that fed early Dada.
