Francis Picabia proclaimed in 1922, “If you want to have clean ideas, change them like shirts.” Throughout his audacious and inventive career of almost 50 years, Picabia lived out that prescription. His work, which ranged from Impressionist painting to radical abstraction, from Dadaism to classicism, reflected his desire to pursue innovative techniques and forms through the use of unorthodox materials.

In 1927, accompanied by his son Lorenzo and the child’s governess Olga Mohler, Picabia left his home in Mougins to spend a few weeks in Barcelona. Although brief, his t.mes in Barcelona would have a significant impact on his work, as he was “fascinated by the recent, ambitious installation of Catalan Romanesque art in what was then the Barcelona City Museum. While there he probably acquired a small illustrated guidebook to the collects ion by its director, Joaquín Folch y Torres, published the year before. This was to play an important role in his work over the course of his remaining career” (Beverley Calté, William A. Camfield, Candace Clements and Arnauld Pierre, Francis Picabia Catalogue Raisonné, vol. I, New Haven, 2015, n.p.).

The artist found a new artistic method in the late 1920s through his technique of layering incongruous imagery in a non-hierarchical way. Picabia observed of this new approach, “My present feeling regarding aesthetics comes from the boredom produced by the sight of pictures that seem to me to be congealed on their immobile surfaces, far removed from anything human… This third dimension, which is not a product of chiaroscuro, these transparencies with their secret depth, enable me to express my inner intentions with a certain degree of verisimilitude. When I lay the foundation stone, I want it to remain under my picture and not on top of it” (quoted in Maria Lluisa Borràs, Picabia, Paris, 1985, p. 340). These works, which became known as the Transparency series, were exhibited at the Théophile Briant Gallery in Paris in 1928, where they enjoyed immense success and were regarded as an extraordinary and radical artistic discovery.

The present work, executed in the late 1930s, harkens back to the artist’s early layered work with its idiosyncratic combination of imagery drawn from Classical, Renaissance and Catalan Romanesque art interspersed with motifs from the natural world. Here, Picabia depicts the central figure, a nude man, crouching and holding his knees. The man’s sculpted muscles and severe face recall the features of a Classical or Renaissance figure, much like Michelangelo’s Ignudi figure painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (see fig. 1). Beside the figure, butterflies and an abstracted diamond pattern float in the foreground.

The butterfly iconography was likely derived from images found in the Atlas de poche des papillons de France, Suisse et Belgique by Paul Girod, and seen as early as 1927 in La Femme au papillon (see fig. 2). This small volume, found in the artist’s library, also offered inspiration for many of the titles of Transparency paintings. The patterning appears to be a simplified, modern version of the Catalan Romanesque motif that the artist used a decade earlier in the Le chameau rose. The motif was likely inspired by an illustration in Picabia’s guidebook by Folch y Torres and likely derived from the Romanesque church, Sant Joan de Boí, Spain (see fig. 3). Even the artist’s use of thick coats of varnish on the surface of the painting evokes the dark patina of Old Master paintings, serving also to obscure and reveal different compositional elements. Art critic Michael Kimmelman remarked of Picabia’s layered imagery, “The artist drew inspiration from divergent sources, not only from antique Roman sculpture and from paintings by Rubens, Dürer and Titian, but also from the Catalan Romanesque frescoes, with their images of many-eyed beasts, that Picabia had seen during his stay in Barcelona” (Michael Kimmelman, “Picabia’s Transparencies: Layers of Many Meanings” The New York t.mes s, 28 April 1989, n.p.).