?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 10,000 - $ 15,000
FRANCIS PICABIA Mater Dolorossa.
Pencil and chalk on cream wove paper, early 1900s. 360x322 mm; 14\x12 3/4 inches. Signed in pencil, lower left recto.
Based on the left hand side of a diptych painting depicting the Virgin Mary (as Mater Dolorossa) and Christ (as the Man of Sorrows) by an unknown Netherlandish master, last quarter of the 15th century, now in the Groeninge Museum, Bruges (inventory number 0000.GROo201.I-0202.I).
Picabia (1879-1953) copied the old masters from an early age, even before attending art school at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, in the late 1890s. Also influenced by the fluid, neo-Impressionist style of Sisley and Signac, he gravitated toward Cubism by 1910 and fell in with the Puteaux Group, which met at the studio of Jacques Villon in Puteaux, in the suburbs of Paris, and included the artists Marcel Duchamp, Albert Gleizes, Roger de La Fresnaye, Fernand Léger and Jean Metzinger. In 1913, Picabia was the only member of the Cubist group to personally attend the Armory Show, and Alfred Stieglitz gave him a solo exhibition at his Gallery 291 in New York. The gallery later, in 1915, devoted an entire issue of it's avant-garde magazine "291" to Picabia's work.
Picabia exhibited The Dance at the Spring, oil on canvas, 1912, a proto-Cubist painting that is now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, at the 1913 Armory Show.
