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Lot Essay
Le rêve de Susanne is a unique and important painting by Francis Picabia that marks the extraordinary fusion of a multitude of the artist’s different painterly styles into one joyous, poignant, playfully erotic and ultimately mysterious image. Created in early 1949, the composition was among a select group of recent works that were chosen by Picabia to represent his latest creative experiments at a major retrospective exhibition, held at the Galerie René Drouin in Paris that spring. Painted over an unknown, earlier painting by the artist, while the original picture was still in its frame, Le rêve de Susanne is an exuberant amalgam of pictorial forms and ‘styles,’ simultaneously referencing Picabia’s post-war ‘psychic abstractions,’ the multi-layered imagery of his earlier ‘transparencies,’ and the playful erotica of his appropriated ‘nudes’ drawn from Parisian magazines of the 1930s.
Here, the dynamism of all these former ‘styles’ are combined in the double-imagery of an attractive young woman reclining in a bathing costume, a crudely painted face and a semi-abstract image in which green horns or locks of hair appear to be emerging from the head of the woman at the centre of the work. These ‘horns,’ as William Camfield has noted in the catalogue raisonné of Picabia’s work, relate Le rêve de Susanne to two other important works of this period also chosen for the 1949 retrospective: Déclaration d’amour (Camfield et al., no. 2027) and Portrait d’un docteur (Camfield et al., no. 1964; Tate Modern, London). The source imagery of the girl in this painting is thought to derive from a 1935 Paris magazine cover, while the ‘Susanne’ of the title is believed to refer to the artist’s paramour during the late 1940s, Suzanne Romain.
Often called ‘Zon’ by Picabia, and sometimes ‘Ennazus,’ Suzanne was the wife of a dentist living in Antibes, with whom the artist had a long, passionate affair. Numerous paintings from this period both depict and are dedicated to her, and Picabia feverishly wrote endless love-poems, letters, telegrams and postcards to Romain, often in the form of Nietzschean aphorisms. These were years that, as Carole Boulbès has written in her 2010 study of Picabia’s writings to Romain, marked a return for the artist to the poetry and obsessive writing of his earlier Dada days. In works such as Le rêve de Susanne, Picabia believed that he had now, finally, begun also to paint like a poet, freely mixing abstract and figurative imagery, colour and content, texture and surface into a single, evocative, free-form language beyond all conventional form and style.
Here, the dynamism of all these former ‘styles’ are combined in the double-imagery of an attractive young woman reclining in a bathing costume, a crudely painted face and a semi-abstract image in which green horns or locks of hair appear to be emerging from the head of the woman at the centre of the work. These ‘horns,’ as William Camfield has noted in the catalogue raisonné of Picabia’s work, relate Le rêve de Susanne to two other important works of this period also chosen for the 1949 retrospective: Déclaration d’amour (Camfield et al., no. 2027) and Portrait d’un docteur (Camfield et al., no. 1964; Tate Modern, London). The source imagery of the girl in this painting is thought to derive from a 1935 Paris magazine cover, while the ‘Susanne’ of the title is believed to refer to the artist’s paramour during the late 1940s, Suzanne Romain.
Often called ‘Zon’ by Picabia, and sometimes ‘Ennazus,’ Suzanne was the wife of a dentist living in Antibes, with whom the artist had a long, passionate affair. Numerous paintings from this period both depict and are dedicated to her, and Picabia feverishly wrote endless love-poems, letters, telegrams and postcards to Romain, often in the form of Nietzschean aphorisms. These were years that, as Carole Boulbès has written in her 2010 study of Picabia’s writings to Romain, marked a return for the artist to the poetry and obsessive writing of his earlier Dada days. In works such as Le rêve de Susanne, Picabia believed that he had now, finally, begun also to paint like a poet, freely mixing abstract and figurative imagery, colour and content, texture and surface into a single, evocative, free-form language beyond all conventional form and style.