![Francis Picabia - Spanish Woman with a Blue Mantilla [c.1941-43] | by Gandalf's Gallery](http://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54292810788_c9e90a2946.jpg)
Francis Picabia - Spanish Woman with a Blue Mantilla [c.1941-43]
The viewer is faced with a woman elegantly dressed in a blue mantilla. Her eyes slightly lowered, her hand raised on her shoulder, she seems captured in a moment of reverie. The plain, sober background is subtly energised by a darker vertical band along the right edge. Inoffensive in appearance, the work reveals Picabia's total independence of mind, who does not hesitate to treat popular and almost archaic imagery, contrary to the aesthetic provocations to which he had accustomed the avant-garde. It is a new challenge that Picabia takes on here: that of provocation through a return to formal academicism. In this sense, the portraits of Spanish women also announce by twenty years the realistic figurative works of the 1940s, painted from magazine photographs.
[Christie’s, Paris - Oil on board, 76.2 x 57.2 cm]
Francis Picabia - Spanish Woman with a Blue Mantilla [c.1941-43]
The viewer is faced with a woman elegantly dressed in a blue mantilla. Her eyes slightly lowered, her hand raised on her shoulder, she seems captured in a moment of reverie. The plain, sober background is subtly energised by a darker vertical band along the right edge. Inoffensive in appearance, the work reveals Picabia's total independence of mind, who does not hesitate to treat popular and almost archaic imagery, contrary to the aesthetic provocations to which he had accustomed the avant-garde. It is a new challenge that Picabia takes on here: that of provocation through a return to formal academicism. In this sense, the portraits of Spanish women also announce by twenty years the realistic figurative works of the 1940s, painted from magazine photographs.
[Christie’s, Paris - Oil on board, 76.2 x 57.2 cm]