Francis Picabia

The present work belongs to a group of paintings known as Transparences that Picabia executed in the late 1920s and early 1930s, deriving their name from multiple layers of overlapping imagery. In Lunis, three female faces and natural elements such as exotic birds, butterflies and foliage all combine into a dizzy celebration of the subconscious. 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 this series of works, Picabia often chose titles based on Biblical characters and Greco-Roman mythology, or names taken from the Atlas de poche des papillons de France, Suisse et Belgique by Paul Girod. This small volume, found in the artist’s library, also explains the motif of butterflies in the present work.

Besides natural phenomena, 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 of mysterious, contemplative beauty. At the time the present work was executed, Botticelli’a painting was among his primary sources of inspiration, and his Three Graces surrounded by nature (fig. 1) are certainly echoed in Lunis. 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.

Fig. 1, Sandro Botticelli, Primavera (detail), circa 1482, tempera on panel, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence