弗朗西斯·畢卡比亞

Paris, Galerie Théophile Briant, Francis Picabia, 1928, no. 27
London, Acoris, The Surrealist Art Centre, Surrealist Masters, 1972, no. 41, illustrated in colour in the catalogue (titled Seville and as dating from 1925)

Maria Lluïsa Borràs, Picabia, Paris, 1985, no. 510, illustrated p. 360 (as dating from 1925)

The board is stable, there are remnants of tape from previous mounting along the reverse of the edges. Apart from a very fine line of surface abrasion running through the man's hand and background towards the upper left, this work is in very good condition. Colours: Overall fairly accurate in the printed catalogue illustration, although stronger and richer in the original.
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The present work belongs to a group of paintings known as Transparences that Picabia executed in the mid 1920s and early 1930s, deriving their name from multiple layers of overlapping imagery. In Toréador, the bullfighter dressed in full attire is overlaid by a traditionally clothed Spanish woman. These images, simultaneously transparent and opaque, are manipulated by Picabia in scale and orientation in such a way as to create a seemingly impenetrable allegory with characteristics of a dream or a mystic vision. In the present work Picabia has combined two of his most important themes – the Transparences with the Espagnoles whose elegant features appeared at the beginning of the 1920s and continued to figure in his art for the rest of his career.

Besides the beauties of Spain, Picabia’s Transparences also draw their inspiration from Romanesque Frescos, Renaissance painting and Catalan art. Rich in cultural references, these paintings combine their varied images into compositions of great beauty and harmony. Following his experimentation with Dadaism and abstraction, in the 1920s Picabia turned away from the aesthetic of shock towards a kind of ‘renaissance’, creating figurative images underpinned by a Classical beauty. Despite the wealth of artistic, cultural and natural references, the meanings of the transparencies remain deliberately obscure and ambiguous, and their power lies in their evocative beauty and elegance of execution.