FRANCIS PICABIA

Starting in 1915, Francis Picabia began to paint portraits of his circle of friends as various machines and mechanical devises. Figures of the avant-garde circle became lamps, engine parts, pulleys and cameras, rendered in clinical diagrammatic lines and playful forms. By 1920, having completed hundreds of these unorthodox portraits known as Mechanomorphs, Picabia abandoned the straight edge precision and rigorous rationality of the series. Instead, the machine parts have melted down and morphed into free-form amorphous objects that resemble single cell organisms as much as they do production line objects. Rendered in metallic silver paint and slick enamel, the means of production still speak to the factory, even if the objects they depict do not. The title too moves the portraits away from the knoweable and into the fantastic imaginary, the unique eunuch an almost impossible figure of Picabia’s creation. Replete with wit as his works were, this painting also features the hallmark of Machine Co., an invented corporation that pokes fun at the natural form of the shapes on display and the overtly human hand present in their creation.

HONORÉ DAUMIER

A prolific artist and a professional caricaturist, these two pursuits, which to Daumier seemed hardly worth distinguishing, were at odds with each other in the public eye. Born into a working-class family, Daumier worked tirelessly from the age of 12 training as an artist and developing a keen eye for the details of society and a revolutionary witticism. By 20 he was producing caricatures for satirical political papers and was arrested for his unflattering depictions of the King Louis Philippe I. This brought with it renown and favour, his works were seen by many and well admired across society yet when he tried to show his paintings and his work as a fine artist, he was rejected almost outright for stepping out of his lane. Few recognised his artistic brilliance and saw his value only as a caricaturist. In the final year of his life, a solo show of his work was shown and, in the months before he died, he received the recognition that had been kept from him.

PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR

More than eight hundred canvases were left in the artist’s studio after his death, in various stages of completion, and this was one of them. Cut from a larger study that contained multiple variations of a similar composition, this small rectangular still life was mounted alone as a work worthy of its own frame. The fruit seems almost alive, so ripe and ready to eat that each individual fig and apple casts a halo of freshness around itself as if inviting the viewer to reach through the oil and grab it. All of which is in sharp contrast to the dainty porcelain of the bowl in the middle, the handles protruding with delicacy outwards to the scene of objects it cannot hold. When Renoir painted this work, his arthritis had become debilitating and his technique was a world away from the one he had used as a young man. The vivid and broad brushstrokes came not, initially, from aesthetic choice but from necessity as it changed his visual language to one he was physically able to achieve. Yet the strange paradox at the heart of it seems to be that as Renoir aged, his works took on a vitality and virility that imbues them with youth and energy far above any of his earlier paintings.