Francis Picabia

This third in a planned four-volume catalogue raisonné of works by the French avant-garde artist Francis Picabia (1879-1953) includes paintings and selected drawings dating from mid-1927 through 1939. Innovative collage-paintings and flamboyant figural compositions known as 'monsters' that dominated Picabia's output in the mid-1920s gave way, during 1927, to new artistic directions. The most important of these was an exploration of the concept of transparency in many forms, first through the addition of new elements to his own pre-existing works, then through the elaboration of tangled compositions, the so-called 'transparencies,' superimposing outlined figures, animals, plants, and other motifs of various origins. Picabia's characteristic refusal of consistency of style endured, however, and his production during the period also encompassed imposing representational compositions with firmly contoured and solidly colored forms, thickly painted topographical landscapes, curvilinear abstractions, and, toward the end, photo-based figural paintings foreshadowing his notorious painted nudes of the early 1940s.