Baigneuse

In the winter of 1924-1925, Francis Picabia began an inventive series of works known as the Monstres paintings. Rendered in rich, gaudy colour and revelling in a loose, free-flowing and open style, these radical compositions, which earned their sobriquet from the artist’s friend and colleague Marcel Duchamp, were intentionally shocking in their deliberate distortion of popular imagery and traditional subjects. The main thematic trends in these works were lovers, landscapes, and women, influenced either by the society people Picabia met in the South of France, or themes treated by the Old Masters, and as such were intended as both a mockery of the pretensions of high art and as a satirical dig at the monstrosity of Riviera ‘high life’ and the ‘flappers’ who chose to party through the winter there.

Picabia had relocated to Mougins in the South of France in 1925, trading in the factionalism and snobbery of the Parisian art world for the luxurious and laidback atmosphere of the Midi. Renouncing the Dadaists, Surrealists, and the artistic establishment in Paris, Picabia fully embraced his new life on the French Riviera, enjoying the pleasures of daily visits to the beach, the raucous atmosphere of the local casinos, as well as his frequent jaunts along the coast in his prized motor-car. Revelling in the sunshine and relaxed climate of his new life in the South of France, Picabia developed a renewed interest in painting, throwing himself headlong into the creation of experimental, novel works. ‘This country which seems … to make some lazy, stimulates me to work,’ he wrote to the renowned couturier and collector Jacques Doucet. ‘I have more and more pleasure in the resumption of painting’ (quoted in W. A. Camfield, Francis Picabia: His Art, Life and Times, Princeton, 1979, p. 216).

Picabia’s newly built home, the Château de Mai, became a focus for avant-garde artists visiting the South of France, receiving such illustrious guests as Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Paul Éluard, Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau, Marcel Duchamp and René Clair. Living in his château and playing on his yacht, Picabia played host to an endless series of parties and intellectual gatherings during these years. Although he later derided the environment on the Côte d’Azur as having given in to ‘the absolute reign of ersatz,’ he revelled in the shallow hedonism and empty materialism of the place, drawing his subjects from the burgeoning population of nouveaux riches and their opportunistic hangers-on, relishing, unmasking and then mercilessly skewering their hypocrisies and pretensions (quoted in S. Cochran, Duchamp Man Ray Picabia, exh. cat., London, 2008, p. 146). In the Monstres series, Picabia captures these scenes and subjects in a striking new vocabulary, embracing bold, colourful patterns, such as stripes, zig-zags and layers of dots, which stood in stark contrast to his linear ‘mechanomorphs’ and silhouette paintings of the early 1920s.

In Baigneuse, a bather is seen emerging from the bright blue water, her towering form portrayed in brilliant, clashing colours using oil and Ripolin paint. A readily available and relatively cheap commercial paint, Ripolin was marketed to the general public as a do-it-yourself material and had been formulated to allow for easy application, usually to interior walls, doors or radiators. Aware of its provocative potential in a fine art context, Picabia had begun to use Ripolin after the First World War as a means of challenging and undermining the hierarchical nature of painting. Writing about the artist’s use of this unconventional material, Marcel Duchamp claimed that it was a thirst for the new, for a fresh way of approaching painting, that drove Picabia to adopt the paint: ‘[his] restlessly inventive spirit leads him to use Ripolin instead of the traditional paint in tubes, which, to his way of thinking, takes on far too quickly the patina of posterity. He likes everything new and the canvases done in 1923, 1924 and 1925 have that newly painted look which preserves all the intensity of the first moment… The gaiety of the titles and his collages of everyday objects shows his impulse to be a renegade, to maintain his position of non-belief in the divinities created far too lightly by the exigencies of society’ (quoted in M. L. Borràs, Francis Picabia, London, 1985, p. 289).

In the present composition, the shiny, bright quality of the Ripolin paint and the unexpected colour combinations create a disquieting effect, underscored by the figure’s deliberately distorted face and elongated limbs. While the bather may have been inspired by a stunningly voluptuous beauty that the artist had spied on a trip to the beach, it is more likely that her origin lay in the mass media – Picabia regularly used motifs from the plethora of brightly coloured, highly kitsch postcards produced for tourists and sold throughout the Riviera. Often repeating the poses almost exactly in his paintings, the artist then introduced a note of parody to their forms by adding multiple eyes, elongated noses and monstrous features. At the same time, Picabia was increasingly intrigued by the work of the Old Masters during these years, using paintings by Sandro Botticelli, Peter Paul Rubens, and Thomas Gainsborough as the basis for his figures in a number of the Monstres series from 1925-26. In Baigneuse, the figure appears to run from the waves, dashing from the water with speed and intent, almost as if she is involved in a sporting event or race. Perhaps inspired by a snapshot from an illustrated magazine, Picabia transforms the bather into a mythical aquatic creature by translating her body into a series of rippling, sinuous waves, lending her form an amorphous quality.

At the same time, Baigneuse may be interpreted as a tongue-in-cheek swipe at Pablo Picasso’s bathers of the same period, perhaps making fun of his penchant for exaggeration and deformation, in limbs and extremities enlarged to gigantic proportions. During the summer of 1925 Picasso spent time with Picabia and his family at the beach in Juan-les-Pins, where their children often played together. Clearly impressed by Picabia’s work that summer, Picasso adopted his use of crude paints such as Ripolin and applied the simplistic assemblage-like language of his Monstres paintings into the formal logic of his own work. In his biography of Picasso, John Richardson discusses not only this artistic exchange between the two artists that summer, but also highlights Picabia’s apparent uncertainty regarding the Monstre paintings: ‘According to Gabrielle [the artist’s wife], Picabia thought he had gone too far in these Monster paintings. Much as he loved to shock, he may have feared that modernists would look askance at a style and technique so perfectly attuned to the sleazy underbelly of the Riviera […] “He was going to destroy them,” Gabrielle said, “but I begged him to do nothing of the sort since they manifested some of the most astonishing aspects of his personality”’ (A Life of Picasso, Vol III: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932, London, 2007, pp. 291-292).