4/30/2023 0 Comments Figleaf ivyFrantz Jourdain, President of the Salon, tried to quell the negative publicity that had resulted from this dispute, and from the subsequent year’s showing of dadaist works, by appointing Picabia to the hanging committee of the Salon in 1921. 11Īt the Salon of 1919 the dadaist paintings had been hung under a stairway, but after Picabia made a public rumpus, the critics sought them out to write acerbic comments about them. As an associate, even a former associate, he could not be excluded from the annual exhibitions, and this he exploited to the full during his dada years (1915–1921). Picabia had been elected as an associate of the Société du Salon d’Automne in 1912, shortly before he emerged as a controversial member of the avant-garde. Copying apples is something everybody understands, copying a turbine is stupid’. But of course, Picabia copies an engineer’s sketch instead of copying apples. Picabia’s reaction was swift and searing: ‘So Picabia has invented nothing, he just copies. It had barely been hung for a week in the Salon d’Automne when an anonymous journalist published an article in the same newspaper revealing that Picabia had based his composition on a diagram of an air brake turbine reproduced in the journal La Science et la Vie (fig.5). Picabia which will no doubt attract the visitors, if not by its aesthetic, at least by its extravagance’ (fig.4). Hot Eyes appeared on the front page of the French newspaper Le Matin on 1 November 1921, accompanied by the text ‘A painting by M. The results of analysis of the materials and techniques used by Picabia in these two works will also be presented, along with an assessment of how the materials themselves have aged. The acknowledged sources of the earlier painting and The Fig-Leaf are examined in this study with regard to the historical context in which they were created and received. He also loaded the work with dada impudence, painting over an earlier notorious mechanomorphic work with characteristic chutzpah and redisplaying the canvas within a year, writing in large bright letters in the main body of the painting, and drawing attention to the main feature of the work, the fig leaf, by the inscription in the top-left corner. Picabia drew on classical sources – both ancient and as manifested in nineteenth-century French art – incorporating references which would not have been lost on the contemporary public. The image in The Fig-Leaf is figurative, yet it resists straightforward interpretation. Picabia did not reveal much about his materials and techniques in his writings, and photographs of him in the studio tended to be carefully choreographed. The gloss, wrinkling and dense colouration of the paint are characteristic of Ripolin housepaint rather than artists’ paint, but as artists’ paint and commercial house paint were both oil-based in the 1920s it had previously been difficult to identify this material positively. Physically, it consists of multiple layers of paint applied over an earlier work – Hot Eyes 1921 – and has variously been described as having been painted in enamel paint, oil or Ripolin, which is a commercial brand of glossy housepaint. The Fig-Leaf (fig.1) is an immensely complex work, despite the disarming simplicity of its appearance.
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