Along with La Nuit espagnole (The Spanish Night) and Dresseur d’animaux (Animal Trainer), La Feuille de vigne (The Fig Leaf) was one of the most spectacular of Picabia’s final submissions to the Paris salons in the 1920s. All three paintings were imposing in scale and provocative in subject, with starkly simple figurative compositions, rendered in commercial enamel paint, that both scandalized and enthralled Parisian audiences. La Feuille de vigne and La Nuit espagnole were first exhibited at the Salon d’Automne in 1922, hung together in an obscure hallway. The New York Times described them as “two of the most amazing paintings in the Salon.”

Stylistically, La Feuille de vigne marked a break with Picabia’s Dada practices, although it was in fact painted over Les Yeux chauds (Hot Eyes), an important mechanomorphic work that had debuted at the Salon d’Automne in 1921 and garnered a range of critical responses. In transforming Les Yeux chauds into La Feuille de vigne, Picabia sought a different kind of source material. Instead of adapting mechanical imagery (he had based Les Yeux chauds on a diagram of an airplane turbine), he derived the composition from Oedipus and the Sphinx (1808), a Neoclassical painting by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres.

Picabia’s Oedipus became a simplified silhouette with a deformed nose, his form entirely black save for a large, jade-green fig leaf, a reference to censorship. The painting’s caption of “DESSiN FRANCAiS,” or “FRENCH DRAWING,” deliberately mocks the conservatism of the salons and the rappel à l’ordre ("return to order")—a major reactionary trend in French art of the 1920s, which upheld Ingres’s art as proof of the superiority of the noble lineage of French academic drawing. This content was doubled in Picabia’s own act of self-censorship and deliberate overpainting.

Although not included in the present exhibition for reasons of extreme fragility, La Feuille de vigne highlights Picabia’s complex re-appropriation of the art of the past and his polemical engagement with his own contemporary moment.

For Annette King, Joyce H. Townsend, and Bronwyn Ormsby’s essay on La Feuille de vigne, see mo.ma/picabia_conservation.