Lot 238 Dα

Francis Picabia's oeuvre was in a continuous state of transition in both style and content. In his later works the celebrated avant-gardist and Dadaist broke with Modernism and turned towards Realism. In the early 1930s he worked with subjects borrowed from antiquity and Christian art, while at the same time using an imagery that was highly simplified and reduced. “Leaving behind his dreamscapes, he suddenly moved on to barren mountains with rugged rural scenes and scenarios from Classicism and other eras of the past. In his paintings until 1935 Picabia only left, as it were, the contours of a single layer of transparency, yet he intensified those contours so much with black that we feel reminded of the lead cames in church windows.” (Roberto Ohrt, in: Zdenek Felix (ed.), exhib. cat. Francis Picabia, Das Spätwerk 1933-1953, Hamburg/Rotterdam 1997, p. 11). The drawing shown here can be seen as paradigmatic for this stylistic phase, and it appears to be closely related to the painting “Deux têtes” of 1934 (Musée du Petit Palais, Geneva; see also Francis Picabia Exhibition Catalogue, op. cit., p. 37 with colour illus.). In this drawing the erotically charged subject receives an extraordinary level of intensity from the vehemence of the contours and the tightly cropped detail.