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拍品專文
“An artist seems to me / like an inadequate / antiquity” Picabia quips in his most audacious poem “Chi-lo-sa” (in I am a Beautiful Monster: Prose, Poetry and Provocations, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2007, p. 389). For a crown prince of the Parisian avant-garde like Picabia, a career-spanning interest in the forms of antiquity might seem curious. Through countless radical stylistic transformations, Picabia found himself deeply indebted to the long arc of art history and was eager to prod and transform his wide-spanning aesthetic inheritance through wit, humor and playful experimentation. Painted in the late 1930s, Poète espagnole stands as one of Picabia’s most successful reverent/irreverent nods to the past, not only through its visual roots in the Middle Ages, but in how he leverages and transforms the Medieval to reflect himself as artist and poet—as an inspired modern master.
A long, stylized visage confronts the viewer, surrounded by a deep, almost mystical, blue ground. Blue-green pigment masks the eponymous poet’s flesh. Echoing the resolute outlines that compose this face, a striped vase holding a wilting yellow flower and a dark, brushy branch find themselves compressed in front of the subject. Picabia’s generous line-work is striking, as the figure’s gaze reads as penetrating but ultimately inscrutable. Yet, this face is familiar... A decade prior to painting Poète espagnol, Picabia executed a large-scale work on paper titled Colloque (Camfield, no. 1029; Private collection), a work in keeping with his fixation on the surreal properties of transparency at the time. At the upper-right sheet edge, literally marginalized, we find the same face peering out at us. This character’s soft sketchiness stands in stark contrast to the present rich and fully-articulated oil. But, this earlier rendering more directly discloses Picabia’s source material.
In 2013, Candace Clements cited an image reproduced in a 1926 book of Catalan Romanesque art and architecture as Picabia’s source of the subject seen in Poète espagnol (“Ce que j’aime peindre!: Retour sur les dernières oeuvres de Picabia,” Les Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne, Paris, 2013, pp. 84-99). The original image is a sketch drawn by the Catalan modernist painter Sebastià Junyent documenting elements of a Catalan Romanesque altarpiece. At the upper right of the sheet, Junyent drew the head of a haloed saint, presumably rendering a detail from the altarpiece’s decorated base panels, almost identical to that found in Picabia’s Colloque and ultimately further transformed in Poète espagnol. Refracted through history and transformed many times over—from the detail conceived by a 12th century artist/craftsman, through the early Catalan modernist’s sketch, through an archival photograph and its blurry printing in 1926, through Picabia’s first appropriation of the image in the late 1920s, to its surreal apotheosis in the present work—Picabia rejoices in the imaginative reproduction of this image and placing himself in dialogue with Catalonian art history.
Picabia’s sense of humor and penchant for radical experimentation add another layer of meaning to this work. A network of deep craquelure shoots across the surface of Poète espagnol, almost indiscriminately fracturing the canvas. At once, the painting feels in and out of time, disjointed and unified. Inverting the academic practices gleaned from his time at the École des arts décoratifs, in this work, Picabia strategically applied a top layer of quick-drying paint over his still wet base layer to achieve this captivating effect. Beyond adding visual intrigue, this intentional craquelure humorously blurs the line between the modern and the antique, the copy and the original.
But why would Picabia transform the saint into a Spanish poet? As his father was of Spanish-Cuban descent and Picabia was a life-long poet, Poète espagnol may be read as a pseudo-self-portrait. As William Copley, fellow artist and legendary surrealist collector who owned the present work for over twenty years recalled: “Picabia was a prolific poet, and I consider most of his writings poetry. It was a poetry of the outrageous” (“About the Hare and the Tortoise But Mostly About the Hare,” originally unpublished, c. 1978, ARTnews, https://www.artnews.com/art-news/artists/about-the-hare-and-the-tortoise-but-mostly-about-the-hare-william-n-copley-on-francis-picabia-in-about-1978-7658/). Further, per Anne Umland, “Picabia had no objection to—and in fact encouraged—those who placed emphasis on his quasi-exotic Spanish heritage” (“Francis Picabia: An Introduction,” Francis Picabia: Our Heads are Round So Our Thoughts Can Change Direction, New York, 2016, p. 13). Picabia fashioning himself as an outsider, passionately pushing the envelope of French painting towards ever-more-radical heights. It’s little wonder Picabia referred to himself as “the masked saint” and felt a deep affinity with Nietzsche’s homo poetica as he secularly exalted the titanic power of human creativity.
A long, stylized visage confronts the viewer, surrounded by a deep, almost mystical, blue ground. Blue-green pigment masks the eponymous poet’s flesh. Echoing the resolute outlines that compose this face, a striped vase holding a wilting yellow flower and a dark, brushy branch find themselves compressed in front of the subject. Picabia’s generous line-work is striking, as the figure’s gaze reads as penetrating but ultimately inscrutable. Yet, this face is familiar... A decade prior to painting Poète espagnol, Picabia executed a large-scale work on paper titled Colloque (Camfield, no. 1029; Private collection), a work in keeping with his fixation on the surreal properties of transparency at the time. At the upper-right sheet edge, literally marginalized, we find the same face peering out at us. This character’s soft sketchiness stands in stark contrast to the present rich and fully-articulated oil. But, this earlier rendering more directly discloses Picabia’s source material.
In 2013, Candace Clements cited an image reproduced in a 1926 book of Catalan Romanesque art and architecture as Picabia’s source of the subject seen in Poète espagnol (“Ce que j’aime peindre!: Retour sur les dernières oeuvres de Picabia,” Les Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne, Paris, 2013, pp. 84-99). The original image is a sketch drawn by the Catalan modernist painter Sebastià Junyent documenting elements of a Catalan Romanesque altarpiece. At the upper right of the sheet, Junyent drew the head of a haloed saint, presumably rendering a detail from the altarpiece’s decorated base panels, almost identical to that found in Picabia’s Colloque and ultimately further transformed in Poète espagnol. Refracted through history and transformed many times over—from the detail conceived by a 12th century artist/craftsman, through the early Catalan modernist’s sketch, through an archival photograph and its blurry printing in 1926, through Picabia’s first appropriation of the image in the late 1920s, to its surreal apotheosis in the present work—Picabia rejoices in the imaginative reproduction of this image and placing himself in dialogue with Catalonian art history.
Picabia’s sense of humor and penchant for radical experimentation add another layer of meaning to this work. A network of deep craquelure shoots across the surface of Poète espagnol, almost indiscriminately fracturing the canvas. At once, the painting feels in and out of time, disjointed and unified. Inverting the academic practices gleaned from his time at the École des arts décoratifs, in this work, Picabia strategically applied a top layer of quick-drying paint over his still wet base layer to achieve this captivating effect. Beyond adding visual intrigue, this intentional craquelure humorously blurs the line between the modern and the antique, the copy and the original.
But why would Picabia transform the saint into a Spanish poet? As his father was of Spanish-Cuban descent and Picabia was a life-long poet, Poète espagnol may be read as a pseudo-self-portrait. As William Copley, fellow artist and legendary surrealist collector who owned the present work for over twenty years recalled: “Picabia was a prolific poet, and I consider most of his writings poetry. It was a poetry of the outrageous” (“About the Hare and the Tortoise But Mostly About the Hare,” originally unpublished, c. 1978, ARTnews, https://www.artnews.com/art-news/artists/about-the-hare-and-the-tortoise-but-mostly-about-the-hare-william-n-copley-on-francis-picabia-in-about-1978-7658/). Further, per Anne Umland, “Picabia had no objection to—and in fact encouraged—those who placed emphasis on his quasi-exotic Spanish heritage” (“Francis Picabia: An Introduction,” Francis Picabia: Our Heads are Round So Our Thoughts Can Change Direction, New York, 2016, p. 13). Picabia fashioning himself as an outsider, passionately pushing the envelope of French painting towards ever-more-radical heights. It’s little wonder Picabia referred to himself as “the masked saint” and felt a deep affinity with Nietzsche’s homo poetica as he secularly exalted the titanic power of human creativity.