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Lot Essay
The Comité Picabia has confirmed the authenticity of the present lot.
Dating from a pivotal moment in the artist's career, Serpentins is an important machine-inspired work painted by Francis Picabia circa 1922. Reflecting what was largely perceived as the then-pervasive mechanisation of everyday life, Picabia used mechanistic imagery to comment upon the human condition. As the artist stated, perhaps with some irony, 'the genius of the modern world is in machinery, and that through machinery art ought to find a most vivid expression... the machine has become more than a mere adjunct of life. It is really a part of human life - perhaps the very soul' (Picabia, quoted in W. Camfield, Francis Picabia: His Art, Life and Times, New York, 1979, p. 77).
Comprising a series of lines and seemingly abstract, almost arthropod-like forms, the composition for Serpentins was derived by Picabia from a diagram depicting a gas combustion turbine which appeared in the spring of 1918 in the popular scientific journal,La science et la vie (see A. Pierre, 'Sources inéedites pour l'oeuvre machinist de Francis Picabia', in Bulletin de la Sociéte de l'Histoire de l'Art française, 1991, pp. 255-81). Indeed, the work's title, Serpentins, which Picabia has inscribed on the canvas, stems from the diagram's key and refers to the spiral-like coils appearing to the right of the painting. From 1918 to 1922, Picabia selectively appropriated diagrammatic and photographic technical imagery from scientific publications, re-presenting this material as fine art in the form of paintings and drawings. The appropriation of pre-existing 'ready-made' imagery as so acutely illustrated in Serpentins was characteristic of a provocative Dadaist approach to the creation of art which aimed to undermine the notion of the artist as creative genius and boldly suggested that anything and everything could, through the artist's intervention, be considered art. As Picabia remarked, 'the painter makes a choice, then imitates that choice and the deformation is what constitutes art' (Picabia, quoted in exh. cat., Francis Picabia: singulier idéal, Paris, 2002, p. 167). This notion of artistic transformation is underlined in the present picture by the gestural brushwork with which Picabia has rendered the image, and the removal of some of the technical annotations.
The present painting is one of two versions of Serpentins; the other, dating to 1919, is now in the collection of the Musée d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, having belonged to both Marcel Duchamp and André Breton, luminaries of Dadaism and Surrealism respectively. Picabia exhibited his earlier version of Serpentins alongside L'Enfant carburateur, Venus héliotrope and Horloge at the Salon d'Automne of 1919. This was the first time Picabia's so-called 'mechanomorphic' paintings were presented to the Parisian public, and in the context of what was otherwise described as a rather conservative display of art, Picabia's works seemed all the more strange and incomprehensible. As an associate of the salon, Picabia's entries were accepted by the jury, but in an attempt to marginalise these challenging works, the committee hung them in a dark alcove beneath the stairs. Picabia publicly and controversially protested to the peripheral location of his works, deliberately provoking a scandal which ultimately instigated the Dadaist movement in Paris.
Dating from a pivotal moment in the artist's career, Serpentins is an important machine-inspired work painted by Francis Picabia circa 1922. Reflecting what was largely perceived as the then-pervasive mechanisation of everyday life, Picabia used mechanistic imagery to comment upon the human condition. As the artist stated, perhaps with some irony, 'the genius of the modern world is in machinery, and that through machinery art ought to find a most vivid expression... the machine has become more than a mere adjunct of life. It is really a part of human life - perhaps the very soul' (Picabia, quoted in W. Camfield, Francis Picabia: His Art, Life and Times, New York, 1979, p. 77).
Comprising a series of lines and seemingly abstract, almost arthropod-like forms, the composition for Serpentins was derived by Picabia from a diagram depicting a gas combustion turbine which appeared in the spring of 1918 in the popular scientific journal,La science et la vie (see A. Pierre, 'Sources inéedites pour l'oeuvre machinist de Francis Picabia', in Bulletin de la Sociéte de l'Histoire de l'Art française, 1991, pp. 255-81). Indeed, the work's title, Serpentins, which Picabia has inscribed on the canvas, stems from the diagram's key and refers to the spiral-like coils appearing to the right of the painting. From 1918 to 1922, Picabia selectively appropriated diagrammatic and photographic technical imagery from scientific publications, re-presenting this material as fine art in the form of paintings and drawings. The appropriation of pre-existing 'ready-made' imagery as so acutely illustrated in Serpentins was characteristic of a provocative Dadaist approach to the creation of art which aimed to undermine the notion of the artist as creative genius and boldly suggested that anything and everything could, through the artist's intervention, be considered art. As Picabia remarked, 'the painter makes a choice, then imitates that choice and the deformation is what constitutes art' (Picabia, quoted in exh. cat., Francis Picabia: singulier idéal, Paris, 2002, p. 167). This notion of artistic transformation is underlined in the present picture by the gestural brushwork with which Picabia has rendered the image, and the removal of some of the technical annotations.
The present painting is one of two versions of Serpentins; the other, dating to 1919, is now in the collection of the Musée d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, having belonged to both Marcel Duchamp and André Breton, luminaries of Dadaism and Surrealism respectively. Picabia exhibited his earlier version of Serpentins alongside L'Enfant carburateur, Venus héliotrope and Horloge at the Salon d'Automne of 1919. This was the first time Picabia's so-called 'mechanomorphic' paintings were presented to the Parisian public, and in the context of what was otherwise described as a rather conservative display of art, Picabia's works seemed all the more strange and incomprehensible. As an associate of the salon, Picabia's entries were accepted by the jury, but in an attempt to marginalise these challenging works, the committee hung them in a dark alcove beneath the stairs. Picabia publicly and controversially protested to the peripheral location of his works, deliberately provoking a scandal which ultimately instigated the Dadaist movement in Paris.