While midday crowds throng under a brilliant sky on Milan’s Piazza del Duomo, darkness gathers behind the windows of the nearby Palazzo Reale, where the vernissage for a major Francis Picabia retrospective has just begun. “Picabia. Open the Gates of Night” is curated by the artist’s great-granddaughter Anne Berest, who explained in her opening remarks that “to know [Picabia] is… to spend the night with him.” As if in a dream, the exhibition unfurls in a dusky twilight, low-lit galleries gathering works under associative themes that simulate an evening escapade with the playboy artist, evoking everything from ecstatic dance and nocturnal trysts to narcotic delirium and crepuscular epiphany.

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Picabia (1879–1953) is one of the elusive figures of modern art, a Franco-Spanish painter and poet who moved freely between Impressionism, Fauvism, Orphism, Cubism, Machinism, and Dada, counting among his friends luminaries like Marcel Duchamp, Guillaume Apollinaire, Alfred Stieglitz, Erik Satie, and…