‘I had thought I had done everything there was to be done in abstract art, in the art of suggestions… Now I consider that painting must evolve toward the reproduction of life’ – Francis Picabia

Created in 1924, Hercule devant la lune dates from a crucial period in Francis Picabia’s career when, abandoning Dada, he effectively set out on his own deliberately erratic and uniquely individual path of creativity. Through the 1920s, Picabia returned to figurative art and began to incorporate classically-inflected motifs in his compositions, in an ironic take on the interwar French retour à l’ordre (‘return to order’). His principal critique of this direction in painting lay in its apparent lack of innovation, and his appropriation of such visual sources allowed him to gently mock his contemporaries, while simultaneously marking his own individuality within the École de Paris. In Hercule devant la lune, Picabia appears to draw direct inspiration from a piece of classical sculpture, portraying the heroic, muscular figure of Hercules in motion, as he seemingly attempts to pull the moon from the sky with the aid of his curled hook. Executed in a simple vocabulary of sharp lines and loosely worked passages of gouache, Hercule devant la lune anticipates Picabia’s subversive use of classical characters and motifs in the complex, overlapping compositions known as Transparencies which would come to dominate his output during the late 1920s and early 1930s.

Post Lot Text

The Comité Picabia has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
The Comité Picabia has requested to see the work in Paris after the auction for further examination.