On March 15, 1930, Picabia wrote to his friend and dealer Léonce Rosenberg that he had just sold Volucelle [II], which had hung in his dining room in Mougins. “[I]n the next couple days, I’ll start a decoration to replace it,” he wrote. The result was Aello, a painting of two semi-transparent heads in warm shades of burnt sienna that fill a canvas measuring over five feet square. Leafy vegetation covers the composition. Blue-green in the background and spaces between the figures, this overgrowth loses some of its marine tint where it coincides with the faces, shading into orange-umber contour drawings.

Aello represents a second phase in Picabia’s evolution of the Transparencies, in which the busy interiority of paintings from 1929, such as Sphinx, gave way to simpler compositions with elegant, large-scale faces. As was often the case in the Transparencies (and in his career more broadly), Picabia based this composition on preexisting source imagery. The heads are modified simplifications of two angels in Piero della Francesca’s The Baptism of Christ (c. 1450). Picabia adjusted their hairstyles and posture, bringing the two figures into closer proximity and modifying the hand position, but the composition remains largely unchanged.

The title, Aello, invokes pagan mythology: according to Greek myth, Aello was one of the harpies, the ferocious bird-women who bore the souls of the dead to the Underworld. The painting was first exhibited at the Galerie Alexandre III, in Cannes, in the late summer of 1930; the opening is said to have been a major social event and was attended by Pablo Picasso.

For Michael Duffy’s essay on Aello, see mo.ma/picabia_conservation.