Sotheby’s Plumps Picabia Transparency Painting for London

Sotheby’s highlights Picabia in their London sale next month and reminds us that MoMA has announced a Picabia Retrospective for the Fall of next year:

Francis Picabia

Lunaris

Oil, brush and ink and black crayon on panel 120 by 94.5cm; 471⁄4 by 371⁄4in.
Painted circa 1929
Est. £800,000 – 1.2 million

Painted circa 1929, Lunaris is an exceptional example of Picabia’s celebrated ‘Transparence’ paintings that Picabia executed in the late 1920s and early 1930s. This series of works, which was a marked departure from the artist’s Dadist experiments of the previous decades, derived its name from the multiple layers of overlapping imagery that Picabia employed and is characterised by figurative images underpinned by a Classical beauty. The first owner of the present work was the influential French art dealer Léonce Rosenberg (1879-1947) who greatly admired Picabia’s work and commissioned several paintings for his home.

As the Museum of Modern Art, New York announced a major Picabia retrospective, scheduled for November 2016, the sale will present two other ‘Transparence’ paintings, including Lunis, also from circa 1929, (est. £800,000- 1,200,000) and Espagnole et Agneau de l’Apocalypse, from circa 1927-1928 (est. £160,000-200,000).