Half a century before Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein used appropriation to define their Pop empires, Francis Picabia was already playfully challenging notions of artistic authorship and individual skill — concepts that would later become pillars of contemporary painting. Painted in 1942, Portrait de femme belongs to a series of realist, figurative paintings of women that Picabia created during a prolific period while living in the South of France in the early 1940s. Rendered in a pseudo-sexualized "popular" realist style, these paintings drew inspiration from soft-core pornographic magazines, movie star picture cards, and nightclub advertisements. The figure’s suspended pose and illuminated face immediately recall the stylized headshots and portraits of women that graced magazine covers and beauty advertisements of the time. By mimicking the harsh glow of artificial stage lighting, Picabia has accentuated the bright highlights of the model’s glossy hair and heavily made-up face. This led friend and scholar Michel Perrin to remark, “The pictures Picabia was painting in March 1942 were so precise, with colors so true to life, that the acerbic critics exclaimed, ‘But this is photography!’” Yet, despite its photographic illusion, the painting subtly undermines its own realism — Picabia deliberately leaves expressive brushstrokes visible, exposing the presence of the artist’s hand to question conventional ideas of skill and authorship. Appropriation of mass media had been a central element of Picabia’s practice since World War I, when he began incorporating images from scientific magazines and journals into his work. This study led to a series of drawings featuring mechanical contraptions, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Ici, c’est ici Stieglitz (Here, This is Stieglitz Here) from 1915. While the subject matter of his later figurative paintings may appear vasty different, the thread of appropriation courses through much of Picabia’s work, providing continuity throughout the artist’s major stylistic shifts in a diverse and ever-evolving oeuvre. An artist who consistently defied tradition, Picabia maintained a fiercely independent stance throughout his career, rejecting prevailing styles and subverting established notions of taste. His iconoclastic approach, combined with a bold disregard for convention, left a lasting impact on future generations. In many ways, his work stands as an early example of “postmodern” art, anticipating the practices of artists such as Warhol, Gerhard Richter, and later figures like Jeff Koons, John Currin, and David Salle. During the 1980s, Picabia’s photo-based works were being rediscovered in exhibitions across Europe, sparking renewed interest from an international audience, including a new generation of American artists. Reflecting on these paintings, Salle commented: “I was very taken by these paintings; I felt an immediate connection to the sensibility. Something about the style — so lurid and melodramatic and full of unlikely juxtapositions, not to mention the somewhat ham-handed way of painting, with its chiseled brushstrokes alternating with little curlicues and the unabashedly eroticized magazine imagery presented front and center — all struck a chord in me. I had never before seen painting as untethered to notions of taste or even intention; there was no way of knowing how to take them, even whether to take them seriously at all. The work was so un-defended — it was like a delirious free-fall. The freedom in those pictures buoyed me up. It was an exhilarating feeling.” Picabia’s defiantly anti-modernist style underscored his lifelong commitment to overturning the conventions of the avant-garde. By relentlessly pushing the boundaries of artistic expression, he carved a path for future postmodern generations, redefining the possibilities of art and its relationship to the broader culture.

Family of Olga Picabia Hauser & Wirth, London Acquired by the present owner from the above

- Hans-Peter Wipplinger (ed.), 'Francis Picabia. Retrospektive', Cologne/DE: Walther König, 2012, p. 139, ill. in colour (exh. cat.) - Michaela Unterdörfer (ed.), 'Calder / Picabia. Transparence', Ostfildern/DE: Hatje Cantz, 2015, p. 103, ill. in colour (exh. cat.)