Francis Picabia

Charles Heumann, Paris (possibly)
Private Collection, France (acquired in the 1910s)
Private Collection, France (by descent from the above and sold: Sotheby's, London, June 21, 2005, lot 440)
Acquired at the above sale

Paris, Galerie Haussmann, Exposition F. Picabia, 1907, no. 6, illustrated in the catalogue

William A. Camfield, Beverley Calté, Candace Clements, Arnauld Pierre & Pierre Calté, Francis Picabia, Catalogue Raisonné, 1898-1914, vol. I, New Haven & London, 2014, no. 168, illustrated in color p. 216

The canvas is not lined. There is a layer of varnish to the surface which may be slightly dirty. There is a rich impasto which is well preserved. Under UV light: there is a 2x3 in. area of inpainting near the upper right corner in the trees which corresponds to evidence of a repaired tear on the reverse. There aer a few other pindot strokes to the extreme edge. Otherwise, fine. This work is in overall good condition.
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A view of the verdant riverside that springs up along the Loing, the present work exemplifies Picabia’s successes as a painter in the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist style. Following in the footsteps of an older generation of artists, he began to spend long periods in Moret and would paint numerous scenes inspired by the surrounding countryside. Picabia painted at least seven versions of the same setting, returning to it as a subject on different occasions over the following years and producing oils that depict the seductive sway of the Loing as it meanders down past an old building.

This preoccupation with the same stretch of river is telling as to Picabia’s technique and approach to painting. Unlike Monet or Sisley, whose interest in the effects of light and atmosphere drew them to return to the same site or motif in different seasons or times of day, Picabia’s depictions of this particular scene are all characterized by the blue skies of a summer’s day. Picabia was less interested in capturing the changing moods of his chosen landscape than in the fact of making an "Impressionist" painting. It was noted by contemporaries, including Pissarro’s sons with whom Picabia spent time in Moret, that rather than painting en plein air in the traditional Impressionist fashion, Picabia often conjured his visions of rural France from photographs or postcards. This marks the beginning of a practice of appropriation that would remain central to Picabia’s art throughout his career, and also calls into question the relationship of his art to the work of artists such as Sisley, Monet and Pissarro.

While his admiration for these artists was genuine—he petitioned to have a monument to Sisley erected in Moret—his own approach to this style of painting treads a delicate line between the aspirational emulation of a young artist and a facility of technique that borders ineluctably and enticingly on pastiche. The impressive scale of the present work alone marks it out from the Impressionist canvases of the previous century. The ease with which Picabia shifts from the pastel tones and soft handling reminiscent of a Monet or a Sisley to the more strident coloration of Neo-Impressionism reveals both a precocious talent and a mischievous disregard for artistic convention and tradition.

Of all the themes that run through Picabia’s remarkably varied oeuvre, questions of originality and creativity remain foremost, and this is as true of his Impressionist paintings as it is of the Dada works. In 1923 Picabia began to tell a story about a period in his life when, as a young man at home and in need of money to finance a growing stamp collection, he had set about systematically selling the paintings in his father’s collection, replacing them with copies of his own making. So accomplished were the copies, that the deceit only came to light when he confessed. This story was intended to make a point about his approach to creating art and—although it cannot be entirely verified—it is at least corroborated by the Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist canvases that dominated his output for nearly a decade.

In discussing this aspect of the artist’s early work in the catalogue for the recent Picabia retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, Gordon Hughes argues that these paintings can be seen as a prelude to the challenging modernity of his later work: "rather than tread the path we typically like to think of as necessary to the development of true artistic maturity—cultivating early flashes of potential to find, through hard work and perseverance, one’s true artistic voice—Picabia began to consider his artistic formation in quite different terms. Fraudulence, he came to realize, or at least its always-present potential, is not something passed through en route to heard-earned authenticity but part and parcel of the very structure of modernism itself" (Gordon Hughes, "Francis Picabia, Once Removed" in Francis Picabia (exhibition catalogue), Kunsthaus, Zurich & Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2016-17, pp. 30-31).