FRANCIS PICABIA (1879-1953)


Paysage suisse signed 'Francis Picabia' (lower right)watercolor and pen and ink on paper13 1/4 x 12 3/4 in (33.5 x 32.5 cm)Executed circa 1920
|This work will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné being prepared by the Comité Picabia.ProvenanceDewitt H. Parker, Ann Arbor (acquired by 1935).Thence by descent from the above in 1949. Francis Picabia was one of the most diverse artists of the 20th century whose career was characterized by abrupt stylistic reversals. First a tried-and-true late-coming Impressionist painter, Picabia later condemned and burned those canvases he could get ahold of while he entered his Dadaist phase. With works ranging from pseudo-classical to surrealist, from photo-based to radical non-objective, anti-art, Picabia relished in his creative audacity and chameleon-like ability to shift aesthetic models. In 1922 he explained this versatility by stating: "If you want to have clean ideas, change them like shirts" (quoted in M. Lowenthal, I am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose and Provocation, Cambridge, 2007, p. 279).Picabia became occupied by the notion of simultaneity/transparency during the early 1920s, and with his denunciation of Dada in 1921, his works abruptly transformed from predominantly anti-art in nature into more figural, albeit surrealist, works. Picabia's oeuvre transformed into a style known as 'transparencies,' aptly named for the multiple layers of transparent images overlaid onto one another. As William A. Camfield wrote: "The transparencies are complex paintings with multiple layers of faces, figures, hands, birds and foliage. The images are here transparent and there opaque, disparate in scale and orientation, charged with mysterious relationships or private symbolism and fraught with ambiguities of form and space similar to those in multiple film exposures. Despite such complexities, most of the early transparencies are imbued with a serene melancholy conveyed by cool color harmonies, ephemeral forms, fluid pigment and, above all, by ideal, classicizing figures" (W. A. Camfield, Francis Picabia (exhibition catalogue), The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1970, p. 41).In the present work, two figures, foliage, and terrestrial forms are superimposed to form an enigmatic, dream-like scene. In Paysage suisse, as in other works in this series, Picabia conveyed his captivation with whimsy and mystery and different levels of perception. Many of Picabia's Transparency works were made according to a personal lexicon only he could decode; indeed, in an introductory essay to a 1930 exhibition of his Transparencies, Picabia humorously asserted these works were an expression of his 'inner desire.' Renowned dealer Léonce Rosenberg was highly impressed by Picabia's Transparency series, championing them to his clients while simultaneously buying three of them and commissioning the artist to create decorative panels for his Parisian home.