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拍品专文
“Picabia was one of the first artists to think of abstract painting as if it were merely one way to make a picture, as if it were just genre among many possible genres… rather than an enduring avant-garde mission or goal.”
Briony Fer
Egouttoir is one of an outstanding series of ironic “abstract” paintings that Francis Picabia made for his major monographic show at the Galerie Dalmau in Barcelona in November 1922. This landmark exhibition showcased the latest of Picabia’s many stylistic shifts, with a series of geometric, abstract paintings hung alongside deliberately kitsch portraits of Spanish women, dressed in traditional lace and mantillas. One of Picabia’s aims with his Dalmau exhibition was to create a multifaceted display of distinctly modern works of art that reflected the vast diversity of style and imagery that could be found in the proliferation of magazines, periodicals, print advertisements and illustrated newspapers during this period. Towards this end, Picabia filled the Dalmau galleries with nearly fifty works, challenging and disarming visitors with a seemingly incoherent display, that jumped incongruously from saccharine, figurative compositions to a boldly abstract lexicon of pure forms without warning or explanation.
The vast majority of the works on show in Dalmau were stark, colorful, geometric abstractions like Egouttoir. While they appeared to echo the latest creations of pioneering avant-garde painters like Piet Mondrian or Kasimir Malevich, in fact none of Picabia’s works were truly abstract—almost all were based on photographic and schematic technical drawings of machines that the artist had discovered in the popular science magazine Science et la vie, with other works from the series variously referencing illustrations for a hydraulic press, an astrolabe, a portable motor and a camera lens. Unlike his earlier mechanomorphic works, the drawings and watercolors from 1922 are deliberately pared back to a limited number of sharp, geometric forms that appear to float independently in random patterns, their short titles carefully inscribed in clear letters on the sheet in a manner that recalls scientific labels. While a direct reference for Egouttoir has yet to be uncovered, the title—which translates to drain, or strainer—suggests it may have been inspired by a component of a much larger piece of industrial machinery. Here, Picabia has reduced the unidentified object to a play of flat rectangles and circles described in subtly variegated shades of blue and black gouache and watercolor, their forms held in place by a mysterious, dynamic tension.
Briony Fer
Egouttoir is one of an outstanding series of ironic “abstract” paintings that Francis Picabia made for his major monographic show at the Galerie Dalmau in Barcelona in November 1922. This landmark exhibition showcased the latest of Picabia’s many stylistic shifts, with a series of geometric, abstract paintings hung alongside deliberately kitsch portraits of Spanish women, dressed in traditional lace and mantillas. One of Picabia’s aims with his Dalmau exhibition was to create a multifaceted display of distinctly modern works of art that reflected the vast diversity of style and imagery that could be found in the proliferation of magazines, periodicals, print advertisements and illustrated newspapers during this period. Towards this end, Picabia filled the Dalmau galleries with nearly fifty works, challenging and disarming visitors with a seemingly incoherent display, that jumped incongruously from saccharine, figurative compositions to a boldly abstract lexicon of pure forms without warning or explanation.
The vast majority of the works on show in Dalmau were stark, colorful, geometric abstractions like Egouttoir. While they appeared to echo the latest creations of pioneering avant-garde painters like Piet Mondrian or Kasimir Malevich, in fact none of Picabia’s works were truly abstract—almost all were based on photographic and schematic technical drawings of machines that the artist had discovered in the popular science magazine Science et la vie, with other works from the series variously referencing illustrations for a hydraulic press, an astrolabe, a portable motor and a camera lens. Unlike his earlier mechanomorphic works, the drawings and watercolors from 1922 are deliberately pared back to a limited number of sharp, geometric forms that appear to float independently in random patterns, their short titles carefully inscribed in clear letters on the sheet in a manner that recalls scientific labels. While a direct reference for Egouttoir has yet to be uncovered, the title—which translates to drain, or strainer—suggests it may have been inspired by a component of a much larger piece of industrial machinery. Here, Picabia has reduced the unidentified object to a play of flat rectangles and circles described in subtly variegated shades of blue and black gouache and watercolor, their forms held in place by a mysterious, dynamic tension.