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Lot Essay
The Comité Picabia has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
“I must know what painting thinks, what painting feels, which means feeling ‘colours,’ loving ‘lines,’ living ‘shapes’...
(Francis Picabia in an interview in the Journal des Arts in 1945)
Picabia did much to define Dada in Paris and New York, and his reputation as one of the movement’s father figures has stayed with him. But it is perhaps the spirit that the movement encouraged in him - his anarchic spirit and his disrespect for conventional abstract modern art - that has yielded his greatest legacy. The fact that Picabia worked in so many styles and toward the end of his life did not seem to take any notice of distinctions between figurative and abstract, high and low, avant-garde and reactionary, does have a certain relevance to contemporary art making.
During WWII and after his marriage in 1940, Picabia was leading a very modest life and many say that his figurative paintings from the early 1940s were purely for commercial value. By 1945 Picabia returned to Paris and resumed painting again in an abstract style and writing poetry. His return to abstraction, during which he attributed his inspiration to the obscure recesses of his mind, as he had always done.
The present work, completed at the end of war, embodies the remarkable diversity of shapes, colours and tones which inhabit these sophisticated later works. The rigid mechanical abstraction of the 1920s works give way to vibrant, expressionist, almost astrological figurations; the inspiration for the underlying pattern can, as always, be attributed to the obscure recesses of the artist’s mind. Picabia learned early on that abstraction could be used to evoke not only qualities of machines, but also to evoke mystery and eroticism. This ensured that abstract painting would be one of the mainstays of his career.
“I must know what painting thinks, what painting feels, which means feeling ‘colours,’ loving ‘lines,’ living ‘shapes’...
(Francis Picabia in an interview in the Journal des Arts in 1945)
Picabia did much to define Dada in Paris and New York, and his reputation as one of the movement’s father figures has stayed with him. But it is perhaps the spirit that the movement encouraged in him - his anarchic spirit and his disrespect for conventional abstract modern art - that has yielded his greatest legacy. The fact that Picabia worked in so many styles and toward the end of his life did not seem to take any notice of distinctions between figurative and abstract, high and low, avant-garde and reactionary, does have a certain relevance to contemporary art making.
During WWII and after his marriage in 1940, Picabia was leading a very modest life and many say that his figurative paintings from the early 1940s were purely for commercial value. By 1945 Picabia returned to Paris and resumed painting again in an abstract style and writing poetry. His return to abstraction, during which he attributed his inspiration to the obscure recesses of his mind, as he had always done.
The present work, completed at the end of war, embodies the remarkable diversity of shapes, colours and tones which inhabit these sophisticated later works. The rigid mechanical abstraction of the 1920s works give way to vibrant, expressionist, almost astrological figurations; the inspiration for the underlying pattern can, as always, be attributed to the obscure recesses of the artist’s mind. Picabia learned early on that abstraction could be used to evoke not only qualities of machines, but also to evoke mystery and eroticism. This ensured that abstract painting would be one of the mainstays of his career.