?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 15,000 - $ 20,000
FRANCIS PICABIA Sans titre (Portrait de femme).
Charcoal on cream wove paper, circa 1941-43. 158x122 mm; 6 1/2x4 7/8 inches. Signed in charcoal, lower left recto.
Provenance: Private collection, Texas.
This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from the Comité Picabia, Paris, dated December 22, 2022, and will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné in preparation by the Comité Picabia.
Picabia (1879-1953) was born into an affluent family in Paris and was introduced to art at a young age. He studied at the École des Arts Decoratifs under Fernand Cormon, Ferdinand Humbert and Albert Charles Wallet. He subsequently worked for Cormon, a leading artist of historical paintings, for four years alongside Georges Braque (1882-1963) and Marie Laurencin (1883-1956) before turning towards emerging modern styles of the late 19th century. He experimented first with Impressionism and Post Impressionism, but then embraced more avant-garde movements such as Fauvism and Cubism.
He is known as an artist who was continuously experimenting with artistic styles and throughout his dynamic career, he also practiced Pointillism, Dadaism and Surrealism. Some of his best-known Dadaist works are the mechanomorphs (created and inspired by his time in New York during the late 1910s), which blended machine imagery with human characteristics. During the period circa 1910-20, he also became closely acquainted with Man Ray (1890-1976) and Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), both of whom joined him in New York; drugs and alcohol became a problem at this time for Picabia and his health declined. He parted with Dada in 1921, and his style continued to evolve over his career, often later abandoning styles he had previously espoused.
