Jeune fille

Painted in 1912, Jeune fille emerged during a crucial period of intense experimentation and innovation in Francis Picabia’s art, as he searched for a mode of expression that captured his restless, revolutionary spirit. The multifaceted character of Picabia’s art during the crucial years preceding the First World War saw him move between a number of avant-garde styles and techniques, absorbing and translating the stylistic and thematic tenets of a variety of movements – from Pointilism to Cubism, Futurism to Orphism – experimenting with their potential to reach an increasingly abstract, unique stylization of form in his work.

With her dark hair swept back into a low chignon, the curving neckline of her off-the shoulder dress and the red accents of her accessories, the woman at the heart of Jeune fille exudes an exotic elegance that recalls the costumes of Spanish flamenco dancers. Several of the artist’s paintings from this year focused on Spanish subjects, including Figure Triste, Procession Seville and Danses à la source, drawing on recollections of places from the artist’s 1909 honeymoon to Spain with his wife Gabrielle. While demonstrating the growing importance of memory and imagination in his art at this time, these paintings are remarkable for the increasingly fragmented approach to form that Picabia adopts in their construction. While their subject matter remains loosely recognisable under close scrutiny, the artist boldly examines the border separating figuration and abstraction, dissolving his scenes into an intriguing play of faceted geometric shapes and planes. Here, the young woman is shown in profile, caught as she turns to look back over her shoulder towards us. Eschewing a detailed rendering of her features, the artist instead emphasises the soft, sweeping curves of her form in a series of long, fluid lines, building her likeness through simplified, flat planes of subtly modulated colour alone.

In the upper left corner of the composition, the title of the painting is printed in bold red letters that clearly identify the subject. While Picabia’s practice of adding the title directly on to the canvas in this way was later viewed as tongue-in-cheek act of provocation, in these pre-war paintings, the practice seems to follow the example of Marcel Duchamp, who was an important influence on his thinking at this time. The two revolutionary artists appear to have met in late 1910 or early 1911, and over the course of their long and enduring friendship, they proved an important stimulus for one another’s creativity. In 1912, Duchamp’s paintings provided a particularly potent catalyst for Picabia’s own experiments with abstraction and cubist form – paintings such as La Mariée, which Picabia had received as a gift from Duchamp shortly after its creation, encouraged the artist to push the boundaries of his own approach to representation even further, transforming the human body into an almost mechanical assemblage of geometric forms.

Through its suggestion of a flamenco performer, meanwhile, Jeune fille appears to reference two important subjects which would continue to exert a firm grip on Picabia’s imagination through the following decade. On the one hand, the motif of dancers in motion would provide the inspiration for two of the artist’s great early masterpieces, the ten-foot square canvases entitled Udnie and Edtaonisl now in the Centre Pompidou, Paris and the Art Institute of Chicago respectively. At the same time, Spanish subjects would continue to fascinate Picabia, culminating in his Espagnole paintings of the early 1920s which offered a deliberately kitsch view of elegant women in delicate lace mantillas and traditional costumes. As such, Jeune fille stands as a key transitional work in Picabia’s oeuvre, pointing not only towards his leap into pure abstraction less than a year later, but also his return to figuration and embrace of a playful Dadaist aesthetic following the First World War.