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Lot Essay
In 1911, Picabia participated in the Salon d’Automne alongside Fernand Léger’s Essai pour trois portraits and Marcel Duchamp’s Portrait (Dulcinée). For the show, Picabia submitted his first forays into serious figure paintings. Though unconfirmed, many scholars believe the present work was included in this exhibition under the title Sur la plage. Previously entranced by influences of Impressionism in the early 1900s, the artist changed course in response to the new movements of Cubism and Futurism, which were dominating the avant-garde at this time. While Duchamp and Léger were responding to the conceptual dissection of the object and fragmentation of form, Picabia sought here to embrace motion through the rapidity and loose quality of the brushwork.
As Virginia Spate has written: “Picabia’s painting was a casual glimpse of figures caught in movement and rapidly set down: if it owed an allegiance to contemporary painting, it was not to Cubism but to Matisse, for it could have been influenced by the abrupt discontinuities of his figure-paintings of 1908-1910. There are similarities between Sur la plage and Matisse’s Musique of 1908 (The Museum of Modern Art, New York)—one of the few works in which Matisse represented the figure in movement, just as Picabia’s picture was his first attempt to represent the moving figure” (op. cit., 286).
As Virginia Spate has written: “Picabia’s painting was a casual glimpse of figures caught in movement and rapidly set down: if it owed an allegiance to contemporary painting, it was not to Cubism but to Matisse, for it could have been influenced by the abrupt discontinuities of his figure-paintings of 1908-1910. There are similarities between Sur la plage and Matisse’s Musique of 1908 (The Museum of Modern Art, New York)—one of the few works in which Matisse represented the figure in movement, just as Picabia’s picture was his first attempt to represent the moving figure” (op. cit., 286).