Match Woman 1925

Here's Picabia's 'Match Woman,' painted with oils on canvas sometime in the first half of the 20th century. I wonder if he started with the blue wash, allowing it to pool and stain the canvas, before deciding to overlay the matches as a kind of sculptural intervention. It is so like Picabia to turn a woman into an object, but the way the matches swarm the figure gives her an uncanny energy and a feeling of suppressed rage. I can imagine him meticulously placing each match, adjusting its angle just so. See how the neatly arranged matches contrast with the erratic jumble elsewhere? I think Picabia is in conversation here with Duchamp’s readymades and his interest in the mechanization of modern life. What does it mean to depict the female form as a collection of mass-produced, combustible objects? All these artists were busy exploring the boundaries of representation and challenging our expectations of what art could be. Like a Dadaist firework, unexpected and fleeting!