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Dimensions: 76.2 by 63.4cm., 30 by 25in.

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Provenance: Sale: Sotheby's, Amsterdam, 3rd October 1988, lot 86
Purchased at the above sale by the present owner

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Notes: To be included in the forthcoming Picabia Catalogue raisonné being prepared by the Comité Picabia.
PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE DUTCH COLLECTION
Femme au châle bleu is a magnificent example of Picabia's late realist style that proved so influential on later contemporary artists such as Sigmar Polke and John Currin. Despite the initial scepticism of his contemporaries, Picabia's return to figurative painting in the 1940s, and in particular his use of kitsch, popular or low-brow imagery in his paintings, are increasingly seen as a conscious parody of the pretensions of the modernist movement. The kitsch imagery of these works, appropriated from magazines and photographs, was an extension of the Dada strategy of using erotic and popular imagery to undermine artistic conventions, but by the 1940s Modernism had become Picabia's target. These works provide a crucial link between the satirising, anti-art sentiments of the Dadaist movement and later postmodernist artists. The twisted Neo-Classicism of Picabia's works, with their Ingresque backlighting, not to mention their photographic sources, have resulted in his 1940s works becoming a paradigm of a new kind of pictoriality. 'Picabia's uninhibited treatment of art, his plurality of styles, his quotations of himself and others naturally encourage reference to today's equally allusive varieties of postmodernism. It is as if Francis Picabia has anticipated the end of painting in its endless, ongoing self-reflection' (Hans Rudolf Reust, 'Moralists are Poorly Informed' in Picabia (exhibition catalogue), Galerie Hauser and Wirth, Zurich, 1997).