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Lot 24*,AR
FRANCIS PICABIA(1879-1953)Tête de femme
Amended
23 November 2021, 16:00 GMT
London, New Bond StreetSold for £212,750 inc. premium
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FRANCIS PICABIA (1879-1953)
Tête de femme
signed 'Francis Picabia' (lower right)
oil and pencil on board
45.9 x 38cm (18 1/16 x 14 15/16in).
Painted circa 1942
signed 'Francis Picabia' (lower right)
oil and pencil on board
45.9 x 38cm (18 1/16 x 14 15/16in).
Painted circa 1942
Footnotes
The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by the Comité Picabia. This work will be included in the forthcoming Francis Picabia catalogue raisonné, currently being prepared.
Provenance
The Marble Arch Gallery, Florida (acquired before 1989).
Anon. sale, Sotheby's, New York, 6 October 1989, lot 185.
Private collection, Florida.
Private collection, Osaka.
Gallery Yamaguchi, Osaka.
Michael Werner Gallery, London (acquired from the above in 2006).
Private collection, Hong Kong (acquired from the above in 2018).
Tête de femme issues from a highly influential series by Francis Picabia realised in the South of France during the 1940s. Now often described as the very first post-modern paintings, these works marked a return to figurative painting for the artist and a predilection for 'popular realism', with imagery drawn from the printed ephemera of the day, including nightclub advertisements, postcards and illustrated 'pin-up' magazines. Following their execution these wartime paintings faded into obscurity with many critics dismissing them as kitsch, however the series underwent a dramatic revaluation in the 1980s with commentators recognising the importance of Picabia's late work, and specifically the 1940s pin-up series, in challenging traditional modes of representation in a way that presaged the post-modern discourse of the day.
Of particular influence in this critical reappraisal was a comprehensive survey of Picabia's work which travelled to three European museums as well as a 1983 show at the Mary Boone/Michael Werner Gallery, where the present work formerly resided. In this radical 1940s series, Picabia irreverently rejected modernist norms and refused to conform to prevailing aesthetic taste. It was to become highly influential for future artists, including, amongst others, Robert Rauschenberg, Gerhard Richter, David Salle and Erich Fischl; the latter aptly characterising Picabia as 'pre-postmodern'.
Although it had long been suspected that Picabia's wartime work appropriated imagery directly from photographs, it was Sarah Cocrahan who correctly identified much of his source material - namely the popular photo illustrated soft-core porn magazines of the 1930s. Set against a dark background, the figure in Tête de femme looks seductively up to the viewer with a languorous gaze and sultry eyes. Her thinly pencilled brows, cupid bow lips and frozen pose are highly evocative of archival photographs depicting contemporary starlets. Indeed, Picabia was known to use photographs to reproduce portraits of 1930s actresses such as Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich and Madeleine Solange. In Tête de femme, Picabia even imitates the glare of a photographer's flash-bulb on the figure's face by emphasising the whites of her eyes and the bright highlights on the bridge of her nose, forehead, and neck.
Following a visit to Picabia in Golfe-Juan in March 1942, Michael Perrin, a friend of artist, recalled that Picabia's paintings of the same year 'were so precise with colours so true to life that the acerbic critics exclaimed 'But this is photography!'' The famed collector Gertrude Stein, and close confidante of Picabia's, also identified the influence of photography in his work. Writing in her second autobiography Everyone's Autobiography, she noted that 'Picabia's father was a Spaniard born in Cuba and his mother was the daughter of a French scientist and one of the inventors of photography. So Picabia was brought up on photography not taking photographs but the science of photography' (G. Stein quoted in M.C. Cone, 'Francis Picabia's War' in A. Umland & C. Hug, Francis Picabia, Our Heads Are Round So Our Thoughts Can Change Direction, exh. cat., New York, 2016, p. 225). It was the sense of stasis and of arrested motion which, for Stein, provided the link with the photographic medium: 'it was the feeling of movement inside the painting not a painting of a thing moving but the thing painted having inside it the existence of moving' (G. Stein quoted in ibid. p. 226).
Picabia's mimicry of mass-produced photographs and his turn towards popular culture as a legitimate source for inspiration has prompted many critics to categorize this phase of his oeuvre as 'Proto Pop Art'. By rupturing the traditional boundaries between 'high' and 'low' art within the modernist canon and subverting the idea of originality, Picabia anticipated the concepts and devices which would become central to the work of Pop artists such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. Subsequent artists associated with Pop Art, such as Robert Rauschenberg and William Copley, later expressed great admiration for Picabia's figurative, realist canvases of the 1940s, with Copley building an important personal collection of his work.
Picabia's appropriation of photographic imagery is, however, a nuanced and self-reflexive one. As seen in Tête de femme, despite the source material, he does not imitate a smooth, photographic painterly style but rather employs expressionist brushwork and an almost awkward mode of painting which deliberately foregrounds the intervention and touch of the artist. In doing so he wryly sends-up his own pictorial device and calls into question received ideas relating to aesthetics and authorship. As early as 1921 Picabia stated the importance of imitation and parody to his artistic process: 'The artist makes a choice, then imitates his choice, the deformation of this then constitutes Art' (C. Boublès, 'Francis Picabia, Delicious Monsters: Painting, Criticism, History' in Dear Painter, paint me...Painting the Figure since late Picabia, exh. cat., Paris, 2002, p. 31).
Though breaking with artistic convention throughout his career, it was the pin-up series which ultimately secured Picabia's place as a radical forerunner for future artists and movements. His use of appropriation and popular culture anticipated the characteristics of Pop Art, while his unapologetic implementation of a kitschy style prefigured the work of artists such as John Currin and Jeff Koons. Above all, and as exemplified in Tête de femme, Picabia succeeded in breaking away from the Modernist doctrine, which affirmed a rigid, linear pursuit of aesthetic progress, and by contrast revealed that all artmaking is, in fact, self-referential. As Carole Boublès explains, 'When Picabia seeks inspiration [from other sources], he produces a new form of artistic thought. Insofar as it copies or subverts it, it is a parody of the earlier model. But it is also a self-parody that comes from knowing that one is part of History...There can be no 'immaculate conception' no 'pure' writing or painting. Seek, and you will always find the umbilical cord' (C. Boublès, ibid., p. 31).
Saleroom notices
Please note that the Comité Picabia has dated this work as 1936-1937 and not 'circa 1942', as listed on the certificate.
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