Painted on both sides, the present work is an important and rare example of Picabia’s work from the 1940s. Executed in two stages, with Femme nue completed in 1942-43 and Banza in c. 1938, the work coalesces two seminal series that reflect the evolution of Picabia’s artistic production during the wartime years.

FEMME NUE, C.1942-43 (RECTO) - oil on panel

Portraying a voluptuous figure looking back at the viewer, Femme nue belongs to one of the most controversial and fascinating series – a cycle of female nudes that the artist began during the War. Between 1940 and 1943 Picabia painted around forty works in this series, many of which can now be found in important public collections internationally. In Femme nue, the uncomfortable tilt of the neck of the figure, her fleeting glance and expression, project a sense of arrested motion, as if taken from a film still. Indeed, as art historian Sara Cochran discovered as late as the 1990s, in this series Picabia meticulously re-painted photographic images from erotic photo-illustrated magazines from the 1930s, such as Mon Paris, Paris-Magazine, Pour lire à deux, and Paris Plaisir. Although photography remained instrumental throughout Picabia’s oeuvre, notably in his early Dadaist works and Transparencies of the 1930s, the series of female nudes marked a dramatic change in the relationship between his painting and photography. Presenting one of the earliest examples of photographic appropriation, the series evinced a decidedly anti-modernist sensibility and a rebellious dissatisfaction with hierarchies of modern art, which was later compared to appropriation strategies in the works by Richard Prince and Eric Fischl, among others. Dramatically using dark tones, Picabia here articulates intimate lighting and dark background in a way that recalls Manet and the tradition of the Spanish painters.

Executed in more expressive brushwork, the ground appears at once opaque and transparent, contrasting with the smooth realist portrayal of the figure. Delineating an idealised female body in saturated tones, works in the series in part seem to reference and subvert the canons of figuration in the Nazi era, thereby reflecting the artist’s personal response to seismic political change. As critic Robert Ohrt writes, “The nudes during the war years are evidently balanced between caution and abandon; the fleetness of the moment, the speed with which experiences are enjoyed in the open air, the undefined glances - all of these can be read as signs of something clandestine and as the awareness of a form of resistance which nevertheless still takes on board the possibility of a carefree existence.”

BANZA, C.1938 (VERSO) - oil and pencil on board 

Painted on the reverse is a mask-like abstract image on the reverse, emblematic of Picabia’s work in the late 1930s. Painted some twenty years after the Dada and abstract works of Picabia’s youth, Banza is symptomatic of what William Camfield terms ‘the ultimate synthesis.’ Interlacing diagrammatic symbols and archetypal images, the painting echoes and amalgamates the kaleidoscopic stylistic shifts of Picabia’s earlier work. As the artist noted in a late interview, “I must know what painting thinks, what painting feels, which means feeling “colours”, loving “lines”, living “shapes” [...] and all this is the result of a long history. It is the result of a perpetual personal quest related to the work of an artisan which is also that of an artist which leads me to the point where, from a new “technique”, a new “style” emerges.”