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Lot Essay
‘Good painting is not what sells… good painting does not exist: what exists is the man who has something to say and who uses the medium of painting… to externalize his personality’ (F. Picabia, ‘La bonne Peinture’, in Camfield, Francis Picabia: His Art, Life and Times, Princeton, 1979, pp. 186-187)
Magnèto anglaise is one of an outstanding series of brilliantly ironic, ‘abstract’ paintings that Francis Picabia made for his famous solo show at the Galerie Dalmau in Barcelona in November 1922. This landmark exhibition showcased the latest of Picabia’s many aesthetic shifts in style with a series of geometric paintings that parodied abstraction and, in the manner of pictorial blueprints, appeared to articulate a kind of mechanics of beauty. Deceptively clever pictures that qualify as perhaps the first ever ‘post-modernist’ paintings, Picabia’s ‘mechanomorphic’ abstractions are works that appeared to challenge and lampoon the whole idea of modernist aesthetics, the contemporary art market and the mechanical workings of human sexual attraction and interaction. With its titular play on the nature of magnetism as both a mechanical and sexual force that attracts and repels, Magnèto anglaise is a classic example from this great series of paintings. It was bought directly from the artist soon after the Dalmau exhibition by his friend and most important patron of these years, Jacques Doucet, and was singled out by Olga Picabia in her ‘album dé raisonné’ as the most representative mechanomorphic abstraction in the Dalmau show.
One of Picabia’s aims with his Dalmau exhibition was to create a multifarious display of distinctly modern works of art reflective of the vast diversity of style and imagery now to be found coursing through a new era of mass-media communication. Towards this end, Picabia filled the Dalmau galleries with around fifty paintings. The vast majority of these were stark, colourful, geometric abstractions interspersed with a few optical pictures that all collectively flitted between such a range of style and image that they seemed to ask questions about the perceptual mechanics of what had become the influential fleeting images of film, photography and modern advertising. All these works were also distinguished by having the appearance of the latest creations of pioneering abstract painters like Piet Mondrian or Kasimir Malevich; though, in fact, none of Picabia’s works were truly abstract. They were almost all based on mechanical drawings and illustrations of machine parts that Picabia had copied from the popular science magazine, Science et la vie. Seemingly abstract therefore, these paintings were ‘fakes’, he declared in an incendiary statement that aimed to poke fun at the modern art market and its obsession with originality and the idea of the genius-creator. Each of these mechanical abstractions was in fact a work composed of multiple layers of artifice. They were realistic copies of reproductions of real objects that had been incorporated into an abstract design and completed with a whimsical, poetic, or even sexually suggestive title that bestowed its image with an aura of mystery, magic and/or salesmanship.
The stark geometry of these ‘abstractions’ cannot be seen outside of the context of the ‘International Constructivist’ tendency which, around 1921, when the new art of Soviet Russia had first been shown in Berlin and through the developments of the Bauhaus and the De Stijl movement, had suddenly come to dominate much of the modern art scene in Europe. Distinctive for its utopian claims on the future, this abstraction and/or constructivism held such widespread appeal at this time that, in 1922, even former Dadaists had sought to form a Dada-Constructivist alliance. One month before Picabia’s Dalmau exhibition, for example, in October 1922, two Dada-Constructivist conferences were held, in Weimar and Dusseldorf, between leading ‘constructivist’ pioneers like El Lissitzky and Moholy-Nagy and progressive Dadaists such as Tzara, Arp, Hausmann and Schwitters.
Picabia was arguably the first artist of his generation to perceive the language of abstraction as not so much a utopian breakthrough in aesthetics as but another new, but ultimately limited means of making a picture. The most notable thing about the ‘abstract’ paintings he made for the Dalmau exhibition is that these works openly present abstraction in just this way: as being but one among many pictorial styles. In some quarters at this time, such irreverence for the lofty claims of abstraction would have been considered an act of sacrilege. But, as if to reinforce this aspect of these works and also, in fact, to mock the ambitious, revelatory claims for this new art, Picabia provocatively placed a few sugary and distinctly figurative portraits of young Spanish women amongst these austere and deliberately mysterious mechanical and abstract pictures. Picabia said he had included these kitschy portraits because, ‘there are people who do not like machines: for them, I propose Spanish women. If they do not like Spanish women, I’ll make them French women… I find these women beautiful, and not having any “speciality” as a painter... I do not fear compromising myself with them vis-à-vis the elite... To make love is not modern: however, that is still what I like best’ (F. Picabia, 1923, in W. Camfield, Francis Picabia His Art, Life and Times, Princeton, New Jersey, 1979, p. 199).
Picabia was not only lampooning abstraction at his Dalmau exhibition, therefore, but also mocking modernism itself and its supposedly progressive succession of a series of isms and styles. As his statement about the Spanish women also reveals, eroticism and making love were also very much a central theme of this multifarious display. Indeed, such things were never far from Picabia’s work. As in many of his mechanomorphic pictures from the period, a parallel between the mechanical nature of the sexual act and the aesthetic allure of machinery was a key component of these works. Returning to the Dada motif of the machine that had distinguished his art during the war years in New York and where, in conjunction with Marcel Duchamp, Picabia had forged a mechano-morphic language that openly parodied the mechanics of love, sex and beauty, here, once again, Picabia addressed the idea of sexual aesthetics in the machine age.
Magnèto anglaise is one of two paintings in the Dalmau exhibition based on the illustration of ‘une lampe anglaise à magneto’ (An English magneto lamp) that Picabia copied from the June-July edition of Science et la vie of 1919. As in his earlier mechanomorphic paintings such as his facsimile illustration of a light-bulb that he entitled L’Americaine (American Girl) (and to which he gave the added explanation ‘screw her and she lights up’), these pictures make a play on the parallels between sex and machinery. Similarly, therefore, Picabia’s two ‘magneto’ paintings play with the mechanical/sexual parallels between magnetism and illumination. Indeed, the image of a lamp-here seen radiating behind a seemingly motional cascade of black rectangles - is one that recurs time and again in Picabia’s work of this period, from Voila Haviland of 1915, to its final mechanamorphic outing in his painting Lampe - the last work he ever entered at the Salon des Indépendents in 1924.
With its implicit sense of motion, its multiple imagery, (both figurative and abstract), and its pictorial interplay between text and image, as well as between abstract and diagrammatic form, Magnèto anglaise is a work that displays much of the sense of simultaneity and diversity that Picabia had sought to assert in the Dalmau exhibition as a whole. Conceiving of this show as a kind of cornucopia of a variety of different images, abstract designs and texts collated into a unity through which the viewer could flit as if flipping through the pages of an illustrated magazine like Science et la vie, Picabia was directly addressing the new ways in which life and imagery were perceived and comprehended in an era of mass-media communication.
That this was his aim here is also reflected in the way in which he incorporated several optical works that played with the idea of perception, in a manner not dissimilar to that of his friend Marcel Duchamp’s roto-reliefs which he set in and amongst the mechanical abstractions and portraits of Spanish women. As photographs of the Dalmau exhibition reveal, the overall impression of this revolutionary show was one of an extraordinary range of graphic, figurative, typographic and abstract form all vying for attention in a manner that called to mind the plethora of visual information in the advertising pages of a magazine. Seeming like an advert for some mysterious, magical product that radiates light and energy, Magnèto anglaise is a work that encapsulates many of the themes of the Dalmau exhibition within one dramatic and singular image.
While its progression of black rectangles clearly references the boundless abstract dimension of Malevich’s suprematist universe, the diagrammatic flame and the radiant solar light blaring behind these forms is, in fact, a recurring motif in Picabia’s art that is not only clearly more profane and earthbound but also one that references the process of looking and of revelation. Reiterating Picabia’s perennial fascination with light, lamps, illumination and the nature of looking, this image ultimately anticipates Picabia’s own experiments with cinema and, in particular, as George Baker has pointed out, the sets against which Picabia was to create his 1924 ballet Relâche. As Baker writes, Magnèto anglaise is perhaps the most demonstrative example of a number of mechanomorphic paintings in which, time after time, ‘we are summoned… to stare like Van Gogh into a series of blinding sources of light… [where]… the mechanomorph [becomes] filled by an endless succession of radiation, from the flame to the spark, from the sun to the eye, to the lamp once more.’ We should ‘consider,’ he continues, ‘the combustive flash at the centre of Magnèto, the flame and effulgent sun dominating Magnèto anglaise - mitigated, or perhaps tantalizingly emphasized, by a series of floating opaque screens - and the shimmering orbs of Lampe [1923]… as the literal engine of expenditure. In this light, [these] last mechanomorphs…had only one sequel: Picabia’s 1924 ballet Relâche where the mechanomorph’s…engagement with blindness was literalized in Picabia’s so-called curtain, a stage-set of some 370 projector lamps backed by reflecting circles aimed directly at the audience’ (Baker, The Artwork Caught by the Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris, Cambridge, Massachussetts, 2007, pp. 278-279).
Magnèto anglaise is one of an outstanding series of brilliantly ironic, ‘abstract’ paintings that Francis Picabia made for his famous solo show at the Galerie Dalmau in Barcelona in November 1922. This landmark exhibition showcased the latest of Picabia’s many aesthetic shifts in style with a series of geometric paintings that parodied abstraction and, in the manner of pictorial blueprints, appeared to articulate a kind of mechanics of beauty. Deceptively clever pictures that qualify as perhaps the first ever ‘post-modernist’ paintings, Picabia’s ‘mechanomorphic’ abstractions are works that appeared to challenge and lampoon the whole idea of modernist aesthetics, the contemporary art market and the mechanical workings of human sexual attraction and interaction. With its titular play on the nature of magnetism as both a mechanical and sexual force that attracts and repels, Magnèto anglaise is a classic example from this great series of paintings. It was bought directly from the artist soon after the Dalmau exhibition by his friend and most important patron of these years, Jacques Doucet, and was singled out by Olga Picabia in her ‘album dé raisonné’ as the most representative mechanomorphic abstraction in the Dalmau show.
One of Picabia’s aims with his Dalmau exhibition was to create a multifarious display of distinctly modern works of art reflective of the vast diversity of style and imagery now to be found coursing through a new era of mass-media communication. Towards this end, Picabia filled the Dalmau galleries with around fifty paintings. The vast majority of these were stark, colourful, geometric abstractions interspersed with a few optical pictures that all collectively flitted between such a range of style and image that they seemed to ask questions about the perceptual mechanics of what had become the influential fleeting images of film, photography and modern advertising. All these works were also distinguished by having the appearance of the latest creations of pioneering abstract painters like Piet Mondrian or Kasimir Malevich; though, in fact, none of Picabia’s works were truly abstract. They were almost all based on mechanical drawings and illustrations of machine parts that Picabia had copied from the popular science magazine, Science et la vie. Seemingly abstract therefore, these paintings were ‘fakes’, he declared in an incendiary statement that aimed to poke fun at the modern art market and its obsession with originality and the idea of the genius-creator. Each of these mechanical abstractions was in fact a work composed of multiple layers of artifice. They were realistic copies of reproductions of real objects that had been incorporated into an abstract design and completed with a whimsical, poetic, or even sexually suggestive title that bestowed its image with an aura of mystery, magic and/or salesmanship.
The stark geometry of these ‘abstractions’ cannot be seen outside of the context of the ‘International Constructivist’ tendency which, around 1921, when the new art of Soviet Russia had first been shown in Berlin and through the developments of the Bauhaus and the De Stijl movement, had suddenly come to dominate much of the modern art scene in Europe. Distinctive for its utopian claims on the future, this abstraction and/or constructivism held such widespread appeal at this time that, in 1922, even former Dadaists had sought to form a Dada-Constructivist alliance. One month before Picabia’s Dalmau exhibition, for example, in October 1922, two Dada-Constructivist conferences were held, in Weimar and Dusseldorf, between leading ‘constructivist’ pioneers like El Lissitzky and Moholy-Nagy and progressive Dadaists such as Tzara, Arp, Hausmann and Schwitters.
Picabia was arguably the first artist of his generation to perceive the language of abstraction as not so much a utopian breakthrough in aesthetics as but another new, but ultimately limited means of making a picture. The most notable thing about the ‘abstract’ paintings he made for the Dalmau exhibition is that these works openly present abstraction in just this way: as being but one among many pictorial styles. In some quarters at this time, such irreverence for the lofty claims of abstraction would have been considered an act of sacrilege. But, as if to reinforce this aspect of these works and also, in fact, to mock the ambitious, revelatory claims for this new art, Picabia provocatively placed a few sugary and distinctly figurative portraits of young Spanish women amongst these austere and deliberately mysterious mechanical and abstract pictures. Picabia said he had included these kitschy portraits because, ‘there are people who do not like machines: for them, I propose Spanish women. If they do not like Spanish women, I’ll make them French women… I find these women beautiful, and not having any “speciality” as a painter... I do not fear compromising myself with them vis-à-vis the elite... To make love is not modern: however, that is still what I like best’ (F. Picabia, 1923, in W. Camfield, Francis Picabia His Art, Life and Times, Princeton, New Jersey, 1979, p. 199).
Picabia was not only lampooning abstraction at his Dalmau exhibition, therefore, but also mocking modernism itself and its supposedly progressive succession of a series of isms and styles. As his statement about the Spanish women also reveals, eroticism and making love were also very much a central theme of this multifarious display. Indeed, such things were never far from Picabia’s work. As in many of his mechanomorphic pictures from the period, a parallel between the mechanical nature of the sexual act and the aesthetic allure of machinery was a key component of these works. Returning to the Dada motif of the machine that had distinguished his art during the war years in New York and where, in conjunction with Marcel Duchamp, Picabia had forged a mechano-morphic language that openly parodied the mechanics of love, sex and beauty, here, once again, Picabia addressed the idea of sexual aesthetics in the machine age.
Magnèto anglaise is one of two paintings in the Dalmau exhibition based on the illustration of ‘une lampe anglaise à magneto’ (An English magneto lamp) that Picabia copied from the June-July edition of Science et la vie of 1919. As in his earlier mechanomorphic paintings such as his facsimile illustration of a light-bulb that he entitled L’Americaine (American Girl) (and to which he gave the added explanation ‘screw her and she lights up’), these pictures make a play on the parallels between sex and machinery. Similarly, therefore, Picabia’s two ‘magneto’ paintings play with the mechanical/sexual parallels between magnetism and illumination. Indeed, the image of a lamp-here seen radiating behind a seemingly motional cascade of black rectangles - is one that recurs time and again in Picabia’s work of this period, from Voila Haviland of 1915, to its final mechanamorphic outing in his painting Lampe - the last work he ever entered at the Salon des Indépendents in 1924.
With its implicit sense of motion, its multiple imagery, (both figurative and abstract), and its pictorial interplay between text and image, as well as between abstract and diagrammatic form, Magnèto anglaise is a work that displays much of the sense of simultaneity and diversity that Picabia had sought to assert in the Dalmau exhibition as a whole. Conceiving of this show as a kind of cornucopia of a variety of different images, abstract designs and texts collated into a unity through which the viewer could flit as if flipping through the pages of an illustrated magazine like Science et la vie, Picabia was directly addressing the new ways in which life and imagery were perceived and comprehended in an era of mass-media communication.
That this was his aim here is also reflected in the way in which he incorporated several optical works that played with the idea of perception, in a manner not dissimilar to that of his friend Marcel Duchamp’s roto-reliefs which he set in and amongst the mechanical abstractions and portraits of Spanish women. As photographs of the Dalmau exhibition reveal, the overall impression of this revolutionary show was one of an extraordinary range of graphic, figurative, typographic and abstract form all vying for attention in a manner that called to mind the plethora of visual information in the advertising pages of a magazine. Seeming like an advert for some mysterious, magical product that radiates light and energy, Magnèto anglaise is a work that encapsulates many of the themes of the Dalmau exhibition within one dramatic and singular image.
While its progression of black rectangles clearly references the boundless abstract dimension of Malevich’s suprematist universe, the diagrammatic flame and the radiant solar light blaring behind these forms is, in fact, a recurring motif in Picabia’s art that is not only clearly more profane and earthbound but also one that references the process of looking and of revelation. Reiterating Picabia’s perennial fascination with light, lamps, illumination and the nature of looking, this image ultimately anticipates Picabia’s own experiments with cinema and, in particular, as George Baker has pointed out, the sets against which Picabia was to create his 1924 ballet Relâche. As Baker writes, Magnèto anglaise is perhaps the most demonstrative example of a number of mechanomorphic paintings in which, time after time, ‘we are summoned… to stare like Van Gogh into a series of blinding sources of light… [where]… the mechanomorph [becomes] filled by an endless succession of radiation, from the flame to the spark, from the sun to the eye, to the lamp once more.’ We should ‘consider,’ he continues, ‘the combustive flash at the centre of Magnèto, the flame and effulgent sun dominating Magnèto anglaise - mitigated, or perhaps tantalizingly emphasized, by a series of floating opaque screens - and the shimmering orbs of Lampe [1923]… as the literal engine of expenditure. In this light, [these] last mechanomorphs…had only one sequel: Picabia’s 1924 ballet Relâche where the mechanomorph’s…engagement with blindness was literalized in Picabia’s so-called curtain, a stage-set of some 370 projector lamps backed by reflecting circles aimed directly at the audience’ (Baker, The Artwork Caught by the Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris, Cambridge, Massachussetts, 2007, pp. 278-279).