작품 상세

Signed 'Francis Picabia' lower right.With an undated photo-confirmation by Olga PicabiaThe drawing offered for sale here seems to be related to the 1934 painting "Deux têtes" (Musée du Petit Palais, Geneva; cf. Zdenek Felix (ed.), exhib. cat. Francis Picabia, Das Spätwerk 1933-1953, Hamburg/Rotterdam 1997, p. 37 with colour illus.). It is not only the directness of the erotic motif that is provocative, but also the abstracted, virtually "Apollonian" style of the heads and their idiosyncratic contour, with which Picabia in turn breaks with and defamiliarises the classical canon."As an exponent of the avant-garde, well-known Dadaist and professional 'enfant terrible' of the Paris art scene in the '20s, his unpredictable recourses to realism and his permanent switching of styles were a slap in the face of contemporary critics. His manifest break with modernism in the '30s seemed even more drastic - a gamble with which Picabia purchased his artistic freedom, but simultaneously entered on to a hazardous path. From then on, he no longer - if he had, in fact, ever done so - followed the guiding concept of modernism, according to which progress continued to exist only as formal innovation; instead, he sought to expand the repertoire of his art to encompass new content and contexts." (Zdenek Felix/Chris Dercon, op. cit., p. 7).