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Lot Essay
"Each painting is a drama for me, passing through all the stages of my previous production, forms, transparencies, overlaid, to continue further and reach that fleeting, but ecstatic moment where I know that I am holding onto that elusive thing that is reality." - Francis Picabia
At the end of World War II, Francis Picabia abandoned realism in favor of his own abstract visual language. Through plastic experimentation, he ventured to translate what has no form but nonetheless exists in our world.
Alongside his contemporaries Henri Goetz, Christine Boumeester, Francis Bott, Jean Atlan, Raoul Ubac, Roberto Matta, Pierre Soulages, Gérard Schneider, Pierre Tal Coat, and Hans Hartung, Picabia formed a group of artists known as the Surindependents and began experimenting with the relationship between Surrealism and Abstract Art in the 1930s onwards. The group’s first major post-war exhibition was at the Salon des Surindépendants in 1945, where Picabia had five canvases.
The resulting works were driven by instinct and inspired by dreams, and their central themes were abstract. Often structurally balanced, sometimes biomorphic, color would often play a secondary role in their compositions. Picabia found that this pictorial language helped him transcribe his inner states. For him, an artist’s output needed to capture the sensitivity and instinct of its creator while breaking down the barriers between him and his public, becoming a means of exchanging sensibilities in their purest state.
As with most of Picabia's work after 1945, the present painting surprises with the simplicity of its composition. A ghostly vertical form, drawn with a thick black outline and haloed in blue, stands against a cool white background. The worked contours of the silhouette evoke the fur of a wild animal, while the six circular forms inside it stand out like pairs of eyes. Perhaps Picabia was inspired by the Valais Monster, the ferocious beast that had attacked numerous herds in the canton of Valais in 1946, and which Picabia had drawn and sent to his friends Boumeester and Goetz the year before painting the present work.
The presence of two triangles arranged opposite each other in the shape of an hourglass is also reminiscent of Picabia's major 1919 work, La Dance du Saint-Guy, now housed at the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges-Pompidou. A transparent painting, without canvas or pictorial material, La Dance du Saint-Guy is reduced to the absurd device of a frame with strings and labels. The triangular motifs in the present painting could also be an implicit sexual reference, the bottom triangle with a vertical line through its center symbolizing the female sex, opposed to the upper triangle which, by the absence of this line, could suggest a masculine sex.
The composition and its meaning remains enigmatic. Instead of giving us formal clues, Picabia appeals to our physical senses using rich impastos to create a highly worked surface that alternates between matte and satin textures. The button-like circular forms aligned at the center of the composition enliven the painting with their green, red and blue pigments, and contrast with the work’s otherwise sober palette.
The present work appears to be a materialization of Picabia's artistic proposition to question the role of art and the artist by exploring new pictorial languages. For the painter, art is not considered a reproduction of nature but rather the emotional experience of the artist in relation to it, expressed subjectively in a synthesis of forms and colors.
At the end of World War II, Francis Picabia abandoned realism in favor of his own abstract visual language. Through plastic experimentation, he ventured to translate what has no form but nonetheless exists in our world.
Alongside his contemporaries Henri Goetz, Christine Boumeester, Francis Bott, Jean Atlan, Raoul Ubac, Roberto Matta, Pierre Soulages, Gérard Schneider, Pierre Tal Coat, and Hans Hartung, Picabia formed a group of artists known as the Surindependents and began experimenting with the relationship between Surrealism and Abstract Art in the 1930s onwards. The group’s first major post-war exhibition was at the Salon des Surindépendants in 1945, where Picabia had five canvases.
The resulting works were driven by instinct and inspired by dreams, and their central themes were abstract. Often structurally balanced, sometimes biomorphic, color would often play a secondary role in their compositions. Picabia found that this pictorial language helped him transcribe his inner states. For him, an artist’s output needed to capture the sensitivity and instinct of its creator while breaking down the barriers between him and his public, becoming a means of exchanging sensibilities in their purest state.
As with most of Picabia's work after 1945, the present painting surprises with the simplicity of its composition. A ghostly vertical form, drawn with a thick black outline and haloed in blue, stands against a cool white background. The worked contours of the silhouette evoke the fur of a wild animal, while the six circular forms inside it stand out like pairs of eyes. Perhaps Picabia was inspired by the Valais Monster, the ferocious beast that had attacked numerous herds in the canton of Valais in 1946, and which Picabia had drawn and sent to his friends Boumeester and Goetz the year before painting the present work.
The presence of two triangles arranged opposite each other in the shape of an hourglass is also reminiscent of Picabia's major 1919 work, La Dance du Saint-Guy, now housed at the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges-Pompidou. A transparent painting, without canvas or pictorial material, La Dance du Saint-Guy is reduced to the absurd device of a frame with strings and labels. The triangular motifs in the present painting could also be an implicit sexual reference, the bottom triangle with a vertical line through its center symbolizing the female sex, opposed to the upper triangle which, by the absence of this line, could suggest a masculine sex.
The composition and its meaning remains enigmatic. Instead of giving us formal clues, Picabia appeals to our physical senses using rich impastos to create a highly worked surface that alternates between matte and satin textures. The button-like circular forms aligned at the center of the composition enliven the painting with their green, red and blue pigments, and contrast with the work’s otherwise sober palette.
The present work appears to be a materialization of Picabia's artistic proposition to question the role of art and the artist by exploring new pictorial languages. For the painter, art is not considered a reproduction of nature but rather the emotional experience of the artist in relation to it, expressed subjectively in a synthesis of forms and colors.