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Lot Essay
The Comité Picabia has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
Painted circa 1940-1942, Tête de femme belongs to a series of realist, figurative paintings of women that Picabia commenced at the beginning of the 1940s during a period of prolific artistic production while living in the South of France. Often derived from photographs and images found in fashion magazines, nightclub advertisements, and picture postcards, these images of women are rendered in a “popular” realist style which allowed Picabia to clearly imitate and replicate the original source image. Picabia had employed this iconoclastic strategy of appropriating mechanically reproduced images for the first time in the 1910s with his Dadaist machine-inspired works, many of which were based on industrial drawings and images that were published in a popular science magazine. There is a strategic continuity between these works and the wartime series, which marks one of the last great stylistic shifts in Picabia’s richly diverse and varied oeuvre.
In Tête de femme, the realistic, imitative style that Picabia used mimics the photographic quality of the image from which it was most likely derived. The figure’s frozen pose and illuminated face is immediately reminiscent of the headshots and portraits of women that adorned the covers of fashion magazines and beauty advertisements. Reproducing the harsh glow of artificial light that falls upon the model’s face, Picabia has also imitated the glossiness of the printed-paper on which the original photographs would have been found. Rendering bright highlights on the model’s glossy hair, her pouting red lips and heavily made-up face, Picabia has not sought to create a smooth photographic-like image, but has instead left his brushstrokes visible, shattering the mimetic façade by revealing the presence of his own hand. In this way, Picabia has wryly played with the concepts of artistic authorship and individual skill that were central to modern painting.
An artist who continuously broke artistic tradition, Picabia maintained a defiantly individual stance throughout his career, refusing to conform to prevailing styles of art and continuously inverting elitist rules of taste. It is this iconoclastic tendency and bold disregard for convention that made Tête de femme and this series of paintings highly influential for future generations of artists. Indeed, with the elevation of mass-media and photography to the realm of art, these playfully parodic works are often considered to be among the very first “postmodern” pictures, pre-empting the work of Andy Warhol and Gerhard Richter. Likewise, in his blatant embrace of kitsch, Picabia also prefigures Jeff Koons. As early as 1921, Picabia stated his defiantly modern objectives: “The painter makes a choice, then imitates it; the deformation of this choice constitutes art” (quoted in C. Boulbès, “Francis Picabia, Delicious Monsters, Painting, Criticism, History” in “Dear Painter, paint me...” Painting the Figure since late Picabia, exh. cat., Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 2002, p. 31).
Painted circa 1940-1942, Tête de femme belongs to a series of realist, figurative paintings of women that Picabia commenced at the beginning of the 1940s during a period of prolific artistic production while living in the South of France. Often derived from photographs and images found in fashion magazines, nightclub advertisements, and picture postcards, these images of women are rendered in a “popular” realist style which allowed Picabia to clearly imitate and replicate the original source image. Picabia had employed this iconoclastic strategy of appropriating mechanically reproduced images for the first time in the 1910s with his Dadaist machine-inspired works, many of which were based on industrial drawings and images that were published in a popular science magazine. There is a strategic continuity between these works and the wartime series, which marks one of the last great stylistic shifts in Picabia’s richly diverse and varied oeuvre.
In Tête de femme, the realistic, imitative style that Picabia used mimics the photographic quality of the image from which it was most likely derived. The figure’s frozen pose and illuminated face is immediately reminiscent of the headshots and portraits of women that adorned the covers of fashion magazines and beauty advertisements. Reproducing the harsh glow of artificial light that falls upon the model’s face, Picabia has also imitated the glossiness of the printed-paper on which the original photographs would have been found. Rendering bright highlights on the model’s glossy hair, her pouting red lips and heavily made-up face, Picabia has not sought to create a smooth photographic-like image, but has instead left his brushstrokes visible, shattering the mimetic façade by revealing the presence of his own hand. In this way, Picabia has wryly played with the concepts of artistic authorship and individual skill that were central to modern painting.
An artist who continuously broke artistic tradition, Picabia maintained a defiantly individual stance throughout his career, refusing to conform to prevailing styles of art and continuously inverting elitist rules of taste. It is this iconoclastic tendency and bold disregard for convention that made Tête de femme and this series of paintings highly influential for future generations of artists. Indeed, with the elevation of mass-media and photography to the realm of art, these playfully parodic works are often considered to be among the very first “postmodern” pictures, pre-empting the work of Andy Warhol and Gerhard Richter. Likewise, in his blatant embrace of kitsch, Picabia also prefigures Jeff Koons. As early as 1921, Picabia stated his defiantly modern objectives: “The painter makes a choice, then imitates it; the deformation of this choice constitutes art” (quoted in C. Boulbès, “Francis Picabia, Delicious Monsters, Painting, Criticism, History” in “Dear Painter, paint me...” Painting the Figure since late Picabia, exh. cat., Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 2002, p. 31).