Picabia was prolific during the war years, especially from 1940 to 1943: “Each day a new painting,” he wrote to his friend Gertrude Stein in early 1940. Picabia had long relied upon images from popular culture. In this moment, he frequently appropriated photographs published in “girlie” magazines like Paris Magazine and Paris Sex Appeal. Of the photo-based paintings that Picabia made during the war, Portrait d’un couple (Portrait of a Couple) is atypical in its lack of nudity. The couple cavorting in the trees is taken from a photograph by the German photographer Paul Wolff, which was published in Paris Magazine in April 1937. The source for the couple in the foreground remains unidentified, although the subjects bear a strong resemblance to Joel McCrea and Andrea Leeds, a Hollywood couple promoted by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios in the late 1930s.

In transferring printed sources to painted compositions, Picabia often chose to highlight the works’ photographic origins. In Portrait d’un couple, for example, specific details, such as the high-contrast “studio” lighting and compositional distortions typical of those produced by the camera’s lens, are carried over in the painting itself, pointing to the artificiality of what some have described as Picabia’s “painted collage.” Although there are no kitschy nudes in Portrait d’un couple, the painting’s slick, thickly applied paint passages, garish color contrasts, and pasty skin tones imbue the scene with a kind of brash—even bodily—physicality.

Not much is known about the early history of Portrait d’un couple. Like many of Picabia’s wartime photo-based works, it was not included in any lifetime or posthumous exhibitions. At the artist’s retrospective at the Grand Palais, in Paris, in 1976, a group of so-called “pin ups" were shown. Subsequently, these works came to be more frequently exhibited and studied, notably by scholar Sara Cochran, who was the first to identify many of Picabia’s specific photo-illustrated magazine sources.

For Michael Duffy and Talia Kwartler’s essay on Portrait d’un couple, see mo.ma/picabia_conservation.