Lot Essay
Picabia was an active member of both the Dada and Surrealist movements but by 1923 he had decided to return to express himself in a more figurative manner. Picabia himself sais, "The reason [for the change in style] is just that I thougt I had done everything there was to be done in abstract art, in art of suggestion...Now I consider that the painting must evolve toward the reproduction of life, without attaching to that the servile imitation of photography." (W. A. Camfield, Francis Picabia, His Art, Life and Times, Princeton, New Jersey, 1979, p. 199).
During the period between 1923 and 1927, Picabia devoted himself mainly to three categories of painting: Spanish subjects; the so-called 'monster' pictures (including the present work); and the Dadaist collages he continued to make. The forms of these monster pictures are figurative wherein forms are depicted with distorted proportions, pointed noses and often with multiple eyes. The use of thick lines and brushstrokes define the figures, whose suggested dress dramatise their form to such an extent that they become surface patterns independent of either form or clothing. The inspiration is of ten derived from works by sixteenth-century Italian masters. Picabia executed several works based on Michelangel's Sibyl as well as on ideas found in Titian and Veronese. Other sources can be found in Rubens and Dürer. The present painting is certainly directly based on Dürer's celebrated engraving The Sea Monster where the pose of the naked woman and the outline of the land is exactly paralleled by Picabia, albeit with a 20th Century inventive adaptation.
It is a typical work "characterised by exaggeratedly long, pointed nose and chin, by an enormous lozenge eye...and use of parallel lines, cross-hatching and concentric arcs to model the human figure." "Picabia's intentions in these direct references to Old Masters is unknown, but it is unlikely that the paintings were undertaken with an attitude of reverence. To the contrary, he seems to be commenting pungently on both the hallowed Renaissance tradition and the classicising tradition-conscious trend of much Western art during the 1920s."
"No such clear examples of Surrealist influence are apparent in Picabia's paintings, but the framework within which he operated, and all kinds of monstrous, nightmarish images during the 1920s, depended in part on Surrealism." (op. cit., 223-224).
During the period between 1923 and 1927, Picabia devoted himself mainly to three categories of painting: Spanish subjects; the so-called 'monster' pictures (including the present work); and the Dadaist collages he continued to make. The forms of these monster pictures are figurative wherein forms are depicted with distorted proportions, pointed noses and often with multiple eyes. The use of thick lines and brushstrokes define the figures, whose suggested dress dramatise their form to such an extent that they become surface patterns independent of either form or clothing. The inspiration is of ten derived from works by sixteenth-century Italian masters. Picabia executed several works based on Michelangel's Sibyl as well as on ideas found in Titian and Veronese. Other sources can be found in Rubens and Dürer. The present painting is certainly directly based on Dürer's celebrated engraving The Sea Monster where the pose of the naked woman and the outline of the land is exactly paralleled by Picabia, albeit with a 20th Century inventive adaptation.
It is a typical work "characterised by exaggeratedly long, pointed nose and chin, by an enormous lozenge eye...and use of parallel lines, cross-hatching and concentric arcs to model the human figure." "Picabia's intentions in these direct references to Old Masters is unknown, but it is unlikely that the paintings were undertaken with an attitude of reverence. To the contrary, he seems to be commenting pungently on both the hallowed Renaissance tradition and the classicising tradition-conscious trend of much Western art during the 1920s."
"No such clear examples of Surrealist influence are apparent in Picabia's paintings, but the framework within which he operated, and all kinds of monstrous, nightmarish images during the 1920s, depended in part on Surrealism." (op. cit., 223-224).