Francis Picabia

Danute Jesaitis Picabia, Paris (the artist's daughter-in-law)

Private Collection (a gift from the above. Sold: Sotheby's, New York, 23rd February 1984, lot 65)

Private Collection (purchased at the above sale. Sold: Sotheby's, London, 4th December 2000, lot 36)

Mr & Mrs George Lindemann, USA (purchased at the above sale)

Sale: Sotheby's, New York, 3rd May 2006, lot 51

Sale: Sotheby's, Paris, 3rd June 2010, lot 53

Purchased at the above sale by the present owner

Paris, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Francis Picabia, Singulier idéal, 2002-03, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

Couple amoureux belongs to one of the most celebrated bodies of work in Picabia’s œuvre, the so-called ‘monster’ paintings dating from the mid-1920s. Having broken off from the official Surrealist movement, in 1925 Picabia left Paris and moved to the Midi, where he built the Château de Mai. Enjoying the splendour offered by this new environment in the South of France, his creativity received a new impetus, and the artist spent his days painting in the vast studio of the Château. After the experimentations with various media and techniques that characterised his Dada years, Picabia’s renewed interest in the medium of painting resulted in works executed in oil and ripolin paint applied with great verve and using a lively palette.

The present work belongs to a group of ‘Couples’ (figs. 2 & 3), highly stylised depictions of men and women with romantic references, often embracing. Here, the artist uses warm pink tones to emphasise the couple’s passionate aura. Behind an intricate pattern of lines and shapes, the greens, blues and yellows blend subtly with the other graphic elements, situating the elegant silhouettes within a pastoral landscape. The simplified forms and lines painted in black and white and surrounded by bright colours are used to signify various elements of the composition, a style that came to be known as signic automatism. Maria Lluïsa Borràs wrote about this group of works: ‘This protracted series of couples transformed into notable examples of signic automatism may have had its origin in the film and play reviews that filled so many pages of Comoedia, which were nearly always illustrated by photographs of the two leading characters in the work under review – almost invariably represented with their heads very close together’ (M. L. Borràs, Picabia, London, 1985, p. 290).

In his ‘monster’ compositions Picabia took as his source of inspiration themes from popular imagery (fig. 1), including society figures he came in contact with, as well as old master paintings that he had fanatically studied at this time. It is possible to identify the origins of Couple amoureux in ancient frescoes, such as those displayed in the collections at the Museo Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (fig. 4). No doubt fascinated by the distortions of these monstrous figures and the rhythm of the compositions that were unrestricted by the rules of naturalistic representation, Picabia seems to have sought to emulate their fantastical features. Arnauld Pierre described the graphic code of these works as containing: ‘the systematic distortion of the faces into grotesque masks, with pointed noses and immense almond shaped eyes, the exaggerated simplification of the anatomical lines, the persistent presence of a decorative vocabulary turned on its head, broken lines, areas of shading, points, and spirals which arrest the gaze with multiple focal points in every part of the work’s surface’ (A. Pierre in Francis Picabia, Singuler idéal (exhibition catalogue), op. cit., p. 279, translated from French).

Although not officially a member of Breton’s group, Picabia continued to work in the field of automatism, central to the Surrealists’ ideology. Borràs further commented about the unique pictorial language Picabia developed during this period: ‘… the eye is simply replaced by the sign of an eye. In these works, now known as his ‘monsters’, Picabia created a new language that enhanced sign and rhythm over and above any other pictorial element, such as line, mass or colour, freeing the hand from all control by reason in such a way that it seemed to be receiving its impulse from the subconscious. He transformed the traditional portrait of a lady with her hand on her breast into the basis of a completely new language, as far removed from Renaissance perspective as it was from Cubist dogmatism. […] The number of works extant in this style permit us to assert that on Picabia’s part this was neither a passing whim nor a chance experiment; it was, on the contrary, the result of a firm intention to explore this new mode and new language to its ultimate consequences’ (ibid., p. 289).