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Lot Essay
The Comité Picabia has confirmed the authenticity of the present lot.
Femme à la mantille was executed in the early years of the 1930s when Francis Picabia was completing his famous Transparency series of paintings. First initiated in the late 1920s, the intricate layering and interlacing of images appropriated from classical and Renaissance art typical of Picabia's earliest Transparencies began to give way to a number of works in which the artist strove for a less complex and more direct means of pictorial expression. Concomitant with this development towards a more classical idiom, Picabia began, in many instances, to deploy an ever darker palette of greens and browns and to use heavy and more simplified lines. Growing out of this stylistic shift, Femme à la mantille, reminiscent of a wood-cut in both its linearity and solemnity, importantly anticipates the artist's boldly contoured figurative works of the mid-1930s.
Picabia's unceasingly experimental approach to art means that his oeuvre defies easy categorization. The image of a woman wearing a veil, however, was a subject the artist returned to regularly. Whereas some of Picabia's veiled women are explicitly derived from Christian iconography, others belong to his series of women dressed in traditional Spanish clothing, known as his 'Espagnoles'. Femme à la mantilla appears to draw from these two traditions.
Born to a French mother and Spanish father, Picabia had a particular predilection for Spanish motifs. A subject first treated by the artist in 1902, the 'Espagnoles' subsequently became a major theme of his work extending from 1916 to the mid-1920s. Picabia once famously described his 'Espagnoles' by saying: 'ce sont des faux' (Picabia, quoted in exh. cat., Francis Picabia: singulier idéal, Paris, 2002, p. 222). In this, he was playfully describing their 'falseness' as Spaniards. Forming part of Picabia's widespread attack on the notion of authenticity and originality, during the 1920s some of the 'Espagnoles' were based on contemporary postcard imagery (J. Mundy, 'The Art of Friendship', in J. Mundy, ed., exh. cat., Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia, London, 2008, p. 46). It has also been established that many of Picabia's portraits of Spanish women were, in fact, derived, and then modified, from paintings by Ingres (see A. Pierre, 'Picabia contre le retour à l'ordre', in exh. cat., Francis Picabia: les nus et la method, Grenoble, 1998, pp. 8-19). In its depiction of a veiled woman, Femme à la mantille bears some resemblance to an Ingres drawing of Saint Catherine, currently in the Musée Ingres in Montauban. At the time that Femme à la mantille was painted, Picabia employed this method of seeking inspiration from both high- and low-brow culture in ironic works which entered into a dialogue with canonical art of the past.
Femme à la mantille was executed in the early years of the 1930s when Francis Picabia was completing his famous Transparency series of paintings. First initiated in the late 1920s, the intricate layering and interlacing of images appropriated from classical and Renaissance art typical of Picabia's earliest Transparencies began to give way to a number of works in which the artist strove for a less complex and more direct means of pictorial expression. Concomitant with this development towards a more classical idiom, Picabia began, in many instances, to deploy an ever darker palette of greens and browns and to use heavy and more simplified lines. Growing out of this stylistic shift, Femme à la mantille, reminiscent of a wood-cut in both its linearity and solemnity, importantly anticipates the artist's boldly contoured figurative works of the mid-1930s.
Picabia's unceasingly experimental approach to art means that his oeuvre defies easy categorization. The image of a woman wearing a veil, however, was a subject the artist returned to regularly. Whereas some of Picabia's veiled women are explicitly derived from Christian iconography, others belong to his series of women dressed in traditional Spanish clothing, known as his 'Espagnoles'. Femme à la mantilla appears to draw from these two traditions.
Born to a French mother and Spanish father, Picabia had a particular predilection for Spanish motifs. A subject first treated by the artist in 1902, the 'Espagnoles' subsequently became a major theme of his work extending from 1916 to the mid-1920s. Picabia once famously described his 'Espagnoles' by saying: 'ce sont des faux' (Picabia, quoted in exh. cat., Francis Picabia: singulier idéal, Paris, 2002, p. 222). In this, he was playfully describing their 'falseness' as Spaniards. Forming part of Picabia's widespread attack on the notion of authenticity and originality, during the 1920s some of the 'Espagnoles' were based on contemporary postcard imagery (J. Mundy, 'The Art of Friendship', in J. Mundy, ed., exh. cat., Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia, London, 2008, p. 46). It has also been established that many of Picabia's portraits of Spanish women were, in fact, derived, and then modified, from paintings by Ingres (see A. Pierre, 'Picabia contre le retour à l'ordre', in exh. cat., Francis Picabia: les nus et la method, Grenoble, 1998, pp. 8-19). In its depiction of a veiled woman, Femme à la mantille bears some resemblance to an Ingres drawing of Saint Catherine, currently in the Musée Ingres in Montauban. At the time that Femme à la mantille was painted, Picabia employed this method of seeking inspiration from both high- and low-brow culture in ironic works which entered into a dialogue with canonical art of the past.