Lot Essay
Picabia exhibited Kalinga in the 1946 Salon des Surindpendants. William A. Camfield described the work as a "More abstract, yet also a more palpable, gripping presence whose ominous form, prickly texture and somber colors of an indescribable Iberian dryness seem to evoke death itself. As in so many of Picabia's 'abstract' paintings, the sinister form dominating Kalinga simultaneously incites and defies efforts to identify it. The title by which the painting was first exhibited La Boeuf (Beef), may suggest such works as Rembrandt's Slaughtered Ox with its parallels to the crucified Christ, but the image in Kalinga also recalls the horned-beef motifs and bears traces of both an African mask and mysterious underlying oval forms. In the final analysis, Kalinga is unidentifiable, but not abstract; intenssely personal but not closed. Rather it is open to the sensuous-spiritual response of any sensitive viewer" (W. A. Camfield, op. cit., Princeton, New Jersey, 1979, p. 268).