Francis Picabia Paintings

Signed and dated post impressionist oil on panel landscape by French painter Francis Picabia. The work depicts open green grassland with bare trees dotted around and clouds rolling through the blue sky overhead. Signature: Signed & dated 1902 lower right Dimensions: Framed: 14.5"x18.5" Unframed: 9"x13" Provenance: The collection of Marie de la Hire (friend of the artist), until 1925 This work is included in the Picabia Catalogue Raisonne - W.A. Camfield, B. Calté, C. Clements, A. Pierre, P. Calté, Francis Picabia, Catalogue Raisonné, Volume I, 1898-1914, Mercatorfonds, Brussels, 2014, n°44 p.175, reproduced in colour p.177 The painting was the property of Marie de La Hire, writer and painter, close to Francis Picabia's studio, for whom she wrote the first monograph and introduction to the exhibition catalogue ("Francis Picabia", Galerie La Cible edition (Galerie Povolozky), 1920). Picabia had invited her to join the other Dadaist artists who participated in 1921 in the collective exhibition "The Cacodylate Eye" by inscribing on the canvas a sentence of their choice. Francis Picabia was born into a cultivated and extremely wealthy family, to a French mother and a Hispano-Cuban father. He enjoyed his considerable family legacy until about 1940, spending profligately. His family encouraged his artistic vocation, and after a painting was accepted by the Salon des Artistes Français in 1894, he studied successively at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1897 in Fernand Cormon’s studio, at the École des Arts Décoratifs in 1901, the Académie du Louvre, and the Académie Humbert, where he met Braque and Marie Laurencin. In 1909, he married Gabrielle Buffet. In 1911, he met Marcel Duchamp, who brought him into theGroupe de Puteaux, centred on Jacques Villon’s studio and of which Guillaume Apollinaire, Albert Gleizes, and Jean Metzinger were also members; he also took part in the activities of the Section d’Or. He is said to have financed the printing of Cubist Painters ( Peintres Cubistes) in exchange for an appearance in the book. Picabia went to New York in 1913 and was invited to exhibit in the Armory Show, the first presentation of modern art in America; there he met the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who in 1906 had opened a gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue. He was called up in 1914 and acted as a general’s chauffeur, and was then sent on an official mission to Cuba. He met Duchamp again in 1915 in New York and stayed there for a while, temporarily living a life of wild excess. He joined Duchamp in his challenge to art and established values. Stieglitz was at this time running a review 291, named after his gallery, and in it he reproduced several of Picabia’s mechanist drawings. In 1916, Picabia left New York for Barcelona, where in January 1917 he founded the review 391, a European extension of Stieglitz’s 291, with Gleizes, Marie Laurencin, and Arthur Craven. He published the first four issues in Barcelona and the following three with Duchamp during his last visit to New York in 1917. After his first collection of poetry, 52 Mirrors...

Francis Picabia 1878-1953 French Moret-sur-Long, en hiver (Moret-sur-Long in Winter) Signed "Picabia" (lower right) Oil on canvas An artist remembe...