Egoïsme

Author: Marijke Peyser

Francis Picabia’s painting Egoïsme was one of the twenty-five works shown at Galerie des Deux-Îles in Paris from 15 November to 4 December 1948.^[1] The artist depicted five circles in bright colours against a dark background. They encircle an elongated element that is reminiscent of a bone and a star, although a phallus seems more likely. The male sexual organ also dominates other paintings from the same period, as in Pistill (1946-47) and I don’t care (1947), and has female ‘counterparts’ in Maintenant et autrefois (1946) and Veuve (1948).

Egoïsme is probably not in the same state as it was in 1948, however, because an earlier signature and date ‘Francis Picabia 1948’ and the title ‘Egoïsme’ lower left were overpainted. During a recent restoration of the painting it came to light that Picabia had drastically changed the work.^[2] In the place where the large black field with the coloured balls is situated, there were originally two horns and a linear structure behind the phallus shape – a motif that Picabia also used in a work like Le rêve de Suzanne (1949).^[3] After the overpainting he gave the work a new signature and dated it 1947-50.

Egoïsme is one of the six works Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen acquired in the 1990s from the private collection of Geertjan Visser. They were a major addition to the Surrealism collection; at that time the museum had no works by Picabia. Visser bought his first Picabia, the portrait of Cravan, in the 1980s after he and his brother Martin Visser, then head curator of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (1978-83), had seen it at the Art Basel art fair. Visser acquired a representative ensemble of three drawings and three oil paintings.

The earliest dated work, Radio Concerts (1921-22), refers to the period when Picabia and André Breton were getting on well together.^[4] This abstract drawing can be described as late Dada ‘machine-style’, a style with characteristic, strikingly two-dimensional shapes such as circles, squares, triangles and rectangles that Picabia employed in the early 1920s. In the years that followed he worked variously in figurative and abstract styles, exploring the interface of art and kitsch (see Femmes Espagnoles). The three oil paintings Egoïsme (1947-50), Viens avec moi, là-bas (1945) and Danger de la force (1947-50) were exhibited in Hamburg and Rotterdam in 1997-98 at the exhibition Francis Picabia – late schilderijen (1933-1953).^[5] The exhibition aimed to show that, in his late work too, Picabia had made major contributions to the development of modern art, in particular to l’art informel, and had developed in new and unexpected directions until the very end.