Sans titre is an evocative work by Francis Picabia that perfectly captures the audacious vision of an artist whose career Marcel Duchamp famously described as a “kaleidoscopic series of art experiences.”i Created in 1938, it belongs to the discrete series of gouache paintings from that year that feature the boldly colored outlines of superimposed motifs against solid black and blue backgrounds, including Superimposed Heads, 1938, which was included in the artist’s acclaimed retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2016-2017. Picabia with these works once expands upon the tenets of his seminal Transparencies, a body of work distinguished by its combination of simultaneously layered images, while pushing his practice forward to new heights with a bold painterly idiom in which form and color are distilled to their most essential. In Sans titre, a trio of horse heads are dynamically superimposed, creating a vivid vignette that is enlivened by a confetti red dots of impasto. Looking at the work, one cannot help but think of Sigmar Polke’s fantastical Stadtbild paintings from 1968-1969, highlighting the profound influence Picabia had on a generation of contemporary artists to come.
"He is a true maverick within the fabric of modernism." —Anne UmlandSans titre clearly exemplifies Picabia’s fascination with layered compositions and the interplay of pictorial surfaces, as evidenced in the Transparency series he began after moving to the French Riviera in 1925. Around the same time, Picabia began drawing inspiration from the Classical world, Renaissance art, and the Catalan Romanesque. This interest is also evident in the present work: the underlying horse heads reveal classical antecedents, while the superimposed head is derived from a detail of a Catalan Romanequse fresco from the church of Sant Joan de Boí, which Picabia would have been familiar with from Joaquín Folch i Torres’s illustrated guidebook that the artist acquired on this visit to the City Museum in Barcelona in 1927.
In the same year that Picabia created the present work, he also painted realistic portraits and impressionist landscapes–truly highlighting Picabia’s tendency to relentlessly change styles and challenge convention in a manner that perhaps defined his credo, “If you want to have clean ideas, change them like shirt.”ii As Zdenek Felix has explained, “his output during the last twenty years before his death bears witness to the restless vision of an artist who was not willing to bow to the dictates of any single style, preferring instead a spirited, ironic, provocative visual language which regarded stylistic change and variation as a crucial principle of artistic and spiritual creativity.”iii