.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
The outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 brought an abrupt end to the deeply personal form of abstract art that Francis Picabia had been working in up to that point. In May 1915, after several months in which he did not paint at all, the artist arrived in New York – preceding Marcel Duchamp by a few weeks – and almost immediately began working in a radically different manner dominated by machine imagery. ‘This visit to America,’ he explained, ‘has brought about a complete revolution in my methods. Prior to leaving Europe I was engrossed in presenting psychological studies through the mediumship of forms which I created. Upon coming to America it flashed on me that the genius of the modern world is in machinery, and that through machinery art ought to find a most vivid expression’ (‘French Artists Spur on an American Art’ in New York Tribune, 1915; quoted in W.A. Camfield, B. Calté, C. Clements, A. Pierre and A. Verdier, Francis Picabia: Catalogue Raisonné, New Haven, 2017, vol. II, p. 38).
In a newspaper interview not long after his arrival in New York, Picabia proclaimed the exciting new direction his art was taking: ‘In seeking forms through which to interpret ideas or by which to expose human characteristics I have come at length upon the form which appears most brilliantly plastic and fraught with symbolism. I have enlisted the machinery of the modern world, and introduced it into my studio... Of course, I have only begun to work out this newest stage of evolution. I don’t know what possibilities may be in store. I mean to simply work on and on until I attain the pinnacle of mechanical symbolism’ (ibid.). Over the ensuing years, the machine became the defining symbol not only of Picabia’s iconography but also of his style and working methods. He broke down mechanical motifs into pure geometric forms, hard-edged and precise, which he paired with titles evoking a human subject. With this daring body of work, which came to be known as Picabia’s ‘mechanomorphic’ pictures, he forcefully disrupted the traditional operations and understanding of fine art, questioning whether the unique and handmade remained relevant in the modern, mechanized era.
Picabia’s pioneering mechanomorphic language often appropriated images from illustrated magazines, scientific periodicals and technical manuals. According to William A. Camfield and Candace Clements, Tournez rare includes fragmentary imagery relating to a siren, which featured in a pencil and ink drawing from this period. By using pre-existing ‘ready-made’ imagery in this way, Picabia invoked the provocative Dadaist approach to the creation of art, which aimed to undermine the notion of the painter or sculptor as creative genius and boldly suggested that anything and everything could, through clever and unexpected interventions, be considered art. As he remarked, ‘the painter makes a choice, then imitates that choice and the deformation is what constitutes art’ (quoted in Francis Picabia: Singulier idéal, exh. cat., Paris, 2002, p. 167). This notion of artistic transformation is underlined in Tournez rare by the passages of gestural brushwork that describe the image, emphasising the artist’s role in the act of translation and reinvention of the source material.
By decontextualising the diagrammatic and photographic imagery from their technical sources and functional purposes, Picabia draws attention to the sensuous appeal of such machinery, the polished finish of their smooth geometric forms, the ways in which different elements fit together. Many of Picabia’s mechanomorphs were also sexually suggestive, parodying the mechanics of love making by presenting it as a dispassionate act, akin to cool, industrial objects coming together. While several other works from 1919 adopt a bawdy, more explicit sexual dimension replete with vividly erotic titles, in Tournez rare the allusion is subtler and more enigmatic. Here, a thin pipe enters the picture frame and feeds into a circular element below, made up of a series of concentric bands that radiate outwards from a bright red central point, like a target. Along one edge, Picabia adds a partial view of a siren box, while a spiralling black wire curves around the central elements, each loop suggesting a cone-like shape at every turn.
The present picture was formerly a double-sided work, with the reverse featuring a second painting, Serpentins (Camfield, et al., no. 620), now in the collection of the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris. The pair of images belonged to both Marcel Duchamp and André Breton, luminaries of Dadaism and Surrealism respectively, and were included together at the Salon d’Automne of 1919, alongside key examples of Picabia’s radical machine aesthetic, including L’enfant carburateur and Horloge (Camfield, et al., nos. 616 and 603). This was the first time Picabia’s mechanomorphic paintings were presented to the Parisian public, and in the context of what was otherwise described as a rather conservative display of art, Picabia’s works seemed all the more strange and incomprehensible. As an associate of the salon, Picabia’s entries were accepted by the jury, but in an attempt to marginalise these challenging works, the committee hung them in a dark alcove beneath the stairs. Picabia publicly and controversially protested the peripheral location of his works, deliberately provoking a scandal which ultimately instigated the Dadaist movement in Paris. The two paintings were subsequently separated into two independent compositions, and Tournez rare entered the collection of the surrealist painter Robert Matta, with whom it remained for almost half a century.
In a newspaper interview not long after his arrival in New York, Picabia proclaimed the exciting new direction his art was taking: ‘In seeking forms through which to interpret ideas or by which to expose human characteristics I have come at length upon the form which appears most brilliantly plastic and fraught with symbolism. I have enlisted the machinery of the modern world, and introduced it into my studio... Of course, I have only begun to work out this newest stage of evolution. I don’t know what possibilities may be in store. I mean to simply work on and on until I attain the pinnacle of mechanical symbolism’ (ibid.). Over the ensuing years, the machine became the defining symbol not only of Picabia’s iconography but also of his style and working methods. He broke down mechanical motifs into pure geometric forms, hard-edged and precise, which he paired with titles evoking a human subject. With this daring body of work, which came to be known as Picabia’s ‘mechanomorphic’ pictures, he forcefully disrupted the traditional operations and understanding of fine art, questioning whether the unique and handmade remained relevant in the modern, mechanized era.
Picabia’s pioneering mechanomorphic language often appropriated images from illustrated magazines, scientific periodicals and technical manuals. According to William A. Camfield and Candace Clements, Tournez rare includes fragmentary imagery relating to a siren, which featured in a pencil and ink drawing from this period. By using pre-existing ‘ready-made’ imagery in this way, Picabia invoked the provocative Dadaist approach to the creation of art, which aimed to undermine the notion of the painter or sculptor as creative genius and boldly suggested that anything and everything could, through clever and unexpected interventions, be considered art. As he remarked, ‘the painter makes a choice, then imitates that choice and the deformation is what constitutes art’ (quoted in Francis Picabia: Singulier idéal, exh. cat., Paris, 2002, p. 167). This notion of artistic transformation is underlined in Tournez rare by the passages of gestural brushwork that describe the image, emphasising the artist’s role in the act of translation and reinvention of the source material.
By decontextualising the diagrammatic and photographic imagery from their technical sources and functional purposes, Picabia draws attention to the sensuous appeal of such machinery, the polished finish of their smooth geometric forms, the ways in which different elements fit together. Many of Picabia’s mechanomorphs were also sexually suggestive, parodying the mechanics of love making by presenting it as a dispassionate act, akin to cool, industrial objects coming together. While several other works from 1919 adopt a bawdy, more explicit sexual dimension replete with vividly erotic titles, in Tournez rare the allusion is subtler and more enigmatic. Here, a thin pipe enters the picture frame and feeds into a circular element below, made up of a series of concentric bands that radiate outwards from a bright red central point, like a target. Along one edge, Picabia adds a partial view of a siren box, while a spiralling black wire curves around the central elements, each loop suggesting a cone-like shape at every turn.
The present picture was formerly a double-sided work, with the reverse featuring a second painting, Serpentins (Camfield, et al., no. 620), now in the collection of the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris. The pair of images belonged to both Marcel Duchamp and André Breton, luminaries of Dadaism and Surrealism respectively, and were included together at the Salon d’Automne of 1919, alongside key examples of Picabia’s radical machine aesthetic, including L’enfant carburateur and Horloge (Camfield, et al., nos. 616 and 603). This was the first time Picabia’s mechanomorphic paintings were presented to the Parisian public, and in the context of what was otherwise described as a rather conservative display of art, Picabia’s works seemed all the more strange and incomprehensible. As an associate of the salon, Picabia’s entries were accepted by the jury, but in an attempt to marginalise these challenging works, the committee hung them in a dark alcove beneath the stairs. Picabia publicly and controversially protested the peripheral location of his works, deliberately provoking a scandal which ultimately instigated the Dadaist movement in Paris. The two paintings were subsequently separated into two independent compositions, and Tournez rare entered the collection of the surrealist painter Robert Matta, with whom it remained for almost half a century.