Francis Picabia Figurative Drawings and Watercolors

Au Cimetière Monsieur... is a black pencil and watercolor drawing realized by Francis Picabia in 1931. Hand signed lower left, with title lower right. A certificate of inclusion in the Catalog Raisonné being prepared by the Picabia Committee, dated 30 October 2019, will be delivered in original along with the work. Drawing originally realized by Picabia to illustrate the important volume "Le Peseur d'Ames" by André Maurois, published by Editions Antoine Roche in 1931. Though specifically realized for the volume, the drawing was not selected for publication and remained in the artist's personal collection. Cm. 27,4x22. Good conditions. Francis Picabia (1879-1953) was born in Paris to a french mother and a Spanish father who was chancellor at the Cuban embassy in Paris. He had a comfortable childhood, even though he was emotionally troubled. He studied at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts. At the beginning of his career, from 1908 to 1913, he was strongly influenced first by the Barbizon School and by Alfred Sisley and Camille Pissarro, then by impressionism, cubism and finally abstractionism. Around 1911 he joined the Puteaux Group which he met in the studio of Jacques Villon in the village of Puteaux. He then became friends with the artist Marcel Duchamp. Some members of the group were Apollinaire, Albert Gleizes, Roger de La Fresnaye, Fernand Léger and Jean Metzinger. From 1913 to 1915 Picabia was often in New York. These years can be identified as the proto-Dada period, which consists mostly of the so-called mechanical portraits (portraits méchaniques): these works ironically proposed mechanistic themes of random tangles of metal parts, paintings and drawings of machines. All these mechanisms on the one hand mocked the cult of the machine, on the other they alluded to sexual intercourse...