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Lot Essay
The Comité Picabia has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
The 'transparencies' are so-called because of their multiple layers of imagery that simultaneously combine to create an illusional and seemingly impenetrable allegory with all the characteristics of a dream or a mystic vision.
Picabia's 'transparencies' were in part derived from the artist's Cubist and Orphist period , but he had also experimented with such layered simultaneity in the film Entr'acte and in some of his 'monster' paintings of the late 1920s. It was therefore primarily within the context of the cinema that these extraordinary works were first interpreted. Gaston Ravel exclaimed excitedly about the first transparencies, 'The multiple impressions we have used, and abused, in our films... are here... immobilised by his magic brush!... at first glance, some confusion perhaps; but, little by little, everything comes clear, slowly... It is a miracle! it is an enchantment ... an homage, involuntary perhaps, rendered to the cinema.' (cited in W. Camfield, Francis Picabia : His art life and times, New York, 1979, p.233)
Similarly excited by Picabia's new paintings was the dealer Léonce Rosenberg who was so impressed by them that in spite of having been reviled and ridiculed by the artist during Picabia's Dada period, he offered Picabia an arrangement with his gallery and commissioned a group of paintings for his wife's room.
Hyale is one of the 'transparency' paintings that Picabia executed in 1930 for his first exhibition at Rosenberg's gallery. This exhibition was a major retrospective of the artist's work that was weighted heavily in favour of Picabia's new 'transparencies'. As many of their classical titles suggest, the 'transparencies' often used as their source material images from Greco-Roman art and Italian Renaissance painting.
The meanings of such works remain deliberately obscure and ambiguous as if they were, as indeed Picabia himself has hinted, made up of a personal code of imagery that only he could recognise and interpret. In his only statement about these works in the introduction for his exhibition at Rosenberg's gallery, Picabia declares that a 'transparency' is an expression of his 'inner desire' to be read by himself alone.
"'Picabia has made too many jokes with his painting!'... is... what certain people find at the bottom of their sack of acrimony... And me, I say: too many jokes have been made with Picabia's painting! I worked for months and years making use of nature, copying it. Now it is my nature that I copy, that I try to express. I was once feverish over calculated inventions, now it is my instinct that guides me... This third dimension, not made of light and shadow, these transparencies with their corner of oubliettes permit me to express for myself the resemblance of my interior desires... I want a painting where all my instincts may have a free course..." (Exh. cat., Francis Picabia: Introduction to the Exhibition Francis Picabia, Chez Léonce Rosenberg, Paris, 1930.)
The 'transparencies' are so-called because of their multiple layers of imagery that simultaneously combine to create an illusional and seemingly impenetrable allegory with all the characteristics of a dream or a mystic vision.
Picabia's 'transparencies' were in part derived from the artist's Cubist and Orphist period , but he had also experimented with such layered simultaneity in the film Entr'acte and in some of his 'monster' paintings of the late 1920s. It was therefore primarily within the context of the cinema that these extraordinary works were first interpreted. Gaston Ravel exclaimed excitedly about the first transparencies, 'The multiple impressions we have used, and abused, in our films... are here... immobilised by his magic brush!... at first glance, some confusion perhaps; but, little by little, everything comes clear, slowly... It is a miracle! it is an enchantment ... an homage, involuntary perhaps, rendered to the cinema.' (cited in W. Camfield, Francis Picabia : His art life and times, New York, 1979, p.233)
Similarly excited by Picabia's new paintings was the dealer Léonce Rosenberg who was so impressed by them that in spite of having been reviled and ridiculed by the artist during Picabia's Dada period, he offered Picabia an arrangement with his gallery and commissioned a group of paintings for his wife's room.
Hyale is one of the 'transparency' paintings that Picabia executed in 1930 for his first exhibition at Rosenberg's gallery. This exhibition was a major retrospective of the artist's work that was weighted heavily in favour of Picabia's new 'transparencies'. As many of their classical titles suggest, the 'transparencies' often used as their source material images from Greco-Roman art and Italian Renaissance painting.
The meanings of such works remain deliberately obscure and ambiguous as if they were, as indeed Picabia himself has hinted, made up of a personal code of imagery that only he could recognise and interpret. In his only statement about these works in the introduction for his exhibition at Rosenberg's gallery, Picabia declares that a 'transparency' is an expression of his 'inner desire' to be read by himself alone.
"'Picabia has made too many jokes with his painting!'... is... what certain people find at the bottom of their sack of acrimony... And me, I say: too many jokes have been made with Picabia's painting! I worked for months and years making use of nature, copying it. Now it is my nature that I copy, that I try to express. I was once feverish over calculated inventions, now it is my instinct that guides me... This third dimension, not made of light and shadow, these transparencies with their corner of oubliettes permit me to express for myself the resemblance of my interior desires... I want a painting where all my instincts may have a free course..." (Exh. cat., Francis Picabia: Introduction to the Exhibition Francis Picabia, Chez Léonce Rosenberg, Paris, 1930.)