2025年12月5日星期五 
A Forgotten Work by Picabia Reappears at Hôtel Drouot
T essier – Sarrou will present a major work by Francis Picabia on 5 December at Hôtel Drouot. The painting has remained in the same collection since 1942, having been acquired at a Red Cross sale in Algiers that year, held for the benefit of American soldiers.
In 1940, fleeing Paris and the Occupation, Picabia settled in Golfe-Juan on the French Riviera. One of the leading figures of the Dada movement, he then entered a unique and strikingly different phase of his career. Amid the isolation and turmoil of war, he abandoned the abstract experiments and conceptual provocations that had made his name, turning instead to figurative painting, often with an ambiguous realism. He focused on large canvases depicting pastoral and rural scenes, nudes, and sentimental figures. This period saw a move away from aggressive avant-garde approaches towards a more “surface-level,” decorative style.
Picabia painted idealised women and couples as refuges from a chaotic world, while maintaining a critical distance. His models were inspired by photographs from popular magazines such as Mon Paris and Paris Magazine, as well as glamour shots and calendars.
Far from a simple return to tradition, this work demonstrates an ironic appropriation of popular imagery. The figures, often copied openly, are reworked with a smooth, artificial touch, giving the paintings an atmosphere that is at once alluring and unsettling.
This so-called “period of realistic transparencies” or “sentimental period,” as critics have called it, marked a departure from the avant-garde language of his Dada years. Yet beneath this apparent concession to public taste, Picabia continued his subversive exploration, blurring the boundaries between high art and mass culture, sincerity and pastiche, beauty and kitsch.
Long misunderstood, these works were rediscovered in the 1970s and are now recognised as a crucial stage in his career, anticipating appropriation art and postmodern approaches, while maintaining a rebellious lineage from both Dada and Pop Art. In the deceptive calm of Golfe-Juan, Picabia continued, in a new form, to interrogate the very meaning of painting and imagery. This modernist approach drew on popular culture, anticipating Pop Art and artists like Julian Schnabel, while cultivating irony and minimal engagement, in the spirit of François Morellet.
Picabia painted idealised women and couples as refuges from a chaotic world, while maintaining a critical distance. His models were inspired by photographs from popular magazines such as Mon Paris and Paris Magazine, as well as glamour shots and calendars.
Far from a simple return to tradition, this work demonstrates an ironic appropriation of popular imagery. The figures, often copied openly, are reworked with a smooth, artificial touch, giving the paintings an atmosphere that is at once alluring and unsettling.
This so-called “period of realistic transparencies” or “sentimental period,” as critics have called it, marked a departure from the avant-garde language of his Dada years. Yet beneath this apparent concession to public taste, Picabia continued his subversive exploration, blurring the boundaries between high art and mass culture, sincerity and pastiche, beauty and kitsch.
Long misunderstood, these works were rediscovered in the 1970s and are now recognised as a crucial stage in his career, anticipating appropriation art and postmodern approaches, while maintaining a rebellious lineage from both Dada and Pop Art. In the deceptive calm of Golfe-Juan, Picabia continued, in a new form, to interrogate the very meaning of painting and imagery. This modernist approach drew on popular culture, anticipating Pop Art and artists like Julian Schnabel, while cultivating irony and minimal engagement, in the spirit of François Morellet.
