Francis PICABIA (Paris 1879-1953)

The fisherman, ca. 1937-1938 Gouache on cardboard 48.5 x 60 cm on view Signed lower right Francis Picabia Provenance: Birth gift to the current owner's mother from Olga Picabia, in 1958, to Madame Hélène Marie Paule Saint Maurice (Henri Saint Maurice, her grandfather, a close friend of Francis and Olga Picabia). Still in the family A certificate from the Picabia Committee will be given to the buyer. This gouache by Francis Picabia, Le Pêcheur, which we have the honor of presenting at our sale, was a birth gift from Olga Picabia to the current owner's mother, Madame Hélène Marie Paule Saint Maurice, in 1958. Never taken out of the family, this work has never before been presented on the art market. This gouache is thus a totally unique piece that embodies the bond of friendship that united these two families. Henri Saint-Maurice, born in 1901 in Martinique and husband of Hélène Marie Paule Saint Maurice, was Managing Director of the Compagnie minière de Conakry and a fervent collector of Picabia's works. A scholar of his time, he completed his secondary education at Louis-le-Grand and Saint-Louis. He was accepted at the Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures, from which he graduated as an engineer in 1923. He subsequently obtained a law degree specializing in international public law and political economy. In 1937, he graduated from the Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques. He began his professional career with Thomson-Houston, before moving to Mexico and Laos to work in metal mining. He then returned to France and obtained a position at Citroën in 1937, then at Société Industrielle des Téléphone in 1944, and at Dunlop between 1949 and 1955. At the same time, he wrote a thesis and obtained a doctorate in law from the Faculty of Paris in 1955, when he was appointed by the International Labor Office to head a mission to train senior executives in Yugoslavia until 1958. This experience enabled him to devote himself to writing a book on the problems of development. In 1960, Henri Saint-Maurice finally took over the management of the Compagnie minière de Conakry and continued to publish works on remuneration and staff training, such as L'Homme sans la misère. His professional activities led him to travel extensively around the world and to rub shoulders with learned and artistic circles, with whom he forged links, exchanged ideas and shared passions. One of these precious encounters was with Francis Picabia, a painter and member of the Spanish aristocracy and French bourgeoisie of his day. Attracted to drawing and painting from an early age, Francis Picabia began his apprenticeship in 1895 at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs. In 1899, he made his debut at the Salon des Artistes Français, where he gradually established himself on the art scene. From 1902 onwards, Picabia began to look more and more closely at the work of Pissarro and Sisley, which prompted him to evolve his vision of art. It was at this point that Picabia's Impressionist period began. He exhibited at the Salon d'Automne, then the Salon des Indépendants, and signed a contract with the Galerie Haussmann. In 1909, when his reputation was well established, Picabia embarked on the adventure of modern art, becoming increasingly independent in his artistic practice. He sought his own visual language, a pictorial renewal aimed at breaking with a traditional reading of art. He drew closer to the avant-garde, particularly abstraction. In 1909, he married Gabrielle Buffet, a French musician and later a key figure in the Dada movement. Their union lasted until 1930, when the two couples, Francis Picabia and Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia on the one hand, and Henri Saint-Maurice and Hélène Marie Paule Saint-Maurice on the other, became close friends. The first evidence of this closeness is a letter from Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, found at the home of the current owners of Le Pêcheur, mentioning Henri Saint-Maurice. As the years went by, Picabia sensed the growing monotony of much modern Parisian art at the turn of the 20s. "My current aesthetic stems from the boredom caused by the spectacle of paintings that appear to me frozen in a motionless surface, far removed from human things. This third dimension, which is not a product of chiaroscuro, these transparencies with their corner of oblivion, allow me to express myself, in the likeness of my inner wills, with a certain verisimilitude. When I lay the first stone, it's there