Gouache on paper. Featuring a portrait of nude. Signed Francis Picabia on the lower right corner. Attributed to Francis Picabia (1879-1953, French). 69 x 49 cm (27.2 x 19.3 inches). PROVENANCE: Southern Ontario estate

Francis Picabia (1879-1953) was a French artist and major figure of the Dada movement. Chameleon like in his ability to shift through aesthetic models, Picabia left a blueprint for future iconoclastic painters, including Sigmar Polke. “What I like is to invent, to imagine, to make myself at every moment a new man, and then, to forget him, forget everything,” he once said. Born on January 22, 1879 in Paris, France to Cuban-Spanish father and a French mother, he was raised in an affluent setting. Picabia went on to attend the École des Arts Decoratifs alongside notable classmates Marie Laurencin and Georges Braque. Throughout the following decades, he employed a number of styles, including Impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism. A radical display of Cubism, his work Dances at the Spring (1912), was shown at the famous 1913 Armory, stirring critics and leading Picabia into the milieu of Dada and Surrealist circles. With his technically precise Machine paintings of the late 1910’s, Picabia established himself in the avant-garde movements of both America and Europe. He later denounced both Dada and Surrealism, as he felt they were producing the same stale theories and derivative work as any previous movement. Picabia died on November 30, 1953 in Paris, France. In 2017, the artist was the subject of comprehensive exhibition “Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round so Our Thoughts Can Change Direction,” held at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Tate Gallery in London, and the Reina Sofia National Museum in Madrid, among others.

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American, 19th century : This work was executed by an unknown hand, and can only be identified by origin (i.e., region, period).