Têtes-paysage

Description

Têtes-paysage (Heads-landscape) belongs to Picabia’s “Transparency” series, a group of works so named for the artist’s use of multilayered, transparent images. In the dreamlike tableaux of the transparencies, Picabia referenced visual sources ranging from ancient Rome to the Renaissance, often juxtaposing the sacred with the profane. These works draw on mythology, religion, and conventions of beauty and, in their blending of the unexpected, project a distinctly Surrealist sensibility. As much as they reflect the traditional world, however, they also mirror modern times: indeed, Picabia derived his simultaneous, nonhierarchical use of images from his experiments in film, especially his 1924 masterpiece with René Clair, Entr’acte.

Provenance

Galerie Fürstenberg (Simone Collinet), Paris, by 1956 [Paris, 1956]. Galerie d’Art Moderne (Marie-Suzanne Feigel), Basel, 1965 [letter from Marie-Suzanne Feigel in curatorial file]. Mary and Leigh Block, Chicago, 1965 [letter of 20 September 1965 from Leigh Block to James Speyer in curatorial file].

Têtes-paysage

Francis Picabia

1928

Accession Number

26082

Medium

Oil on canvas

Dimensions

60.3 × 81.2 cm (23 3/4 × 32 in.)

Classification

oil on canvas

Museum

The Art Institute of Chicago

Chicago, United States

Credit Line

Gift of Mary and Leigh Block