, 'Salome', 1930

In the mid-1920s, after his break with the Dada and Surrealist movements, Picabia began a series of paintings known as ‘transparencies’. In these esoteric, dreamlike compositions, Picabia layers fragments from an eclectic array of sources – classical myth, medieval Catalan frescoes, Old Master paintings and contemporary photography – to give the impression of disparate images superimposed upon each other.

Picabia painted Salomé, a work dense with quotation, in the middle of this period. The story of Salomé itself is biblical: the stepdaughter of King Herod, Salomé demands the head of Saint John the Baptist on a platter and dances in exchange for her wish, becoming a cultural icon of seductive female power. Her lithe figure in Picabia’s painting derives from a 1925 photograph of a ballet dancer, Claire Baruoff, taken by Austrian photographer Trude Fleischmann, while the oversized face was probably based on Botticelli’s Christ the Redeemer (about 1495–1505, National Gallery of Australia), in which a thorned and tearful Christ raises his hand in blessing. Rather than copying from original works, Picabia took from reproductions, much as he had previously made tracings of figures instead of painting models directly. The effect of this process is akin to that of collage – a key tool of the Dadaists, who valued the improvised and unexpected collision of disconnected images.

Despite their well-established reference points, the ‘transparencies’ are full of a personal, hermetic codes which resist conventional interpretation. Picabia’s juxtapositions are anti-systematic, driven less by clear reasoning than intuitive association. For the artist, the works express ‘the resemblance of my interior desires,’ the outcome of an ambition to produce paintings ‘where all my instincts have a free course.’ Such is the alchemical logic of the ‘transparencies’ that they often produce an occult, hallucinatory result. Yet the theme of desire does appear to be central in Salomé: alongside Salomé’s nude figure, the heavy-lidded eyes and half-parted lips of Picabia’s androgynous riff on Botticelli’s Christ imply a latent sensuality.

Picabia simplifies the forms of these overlapping images, painting in a graphic style with strong, sinuous lines. The ‘transparencies’’ lack of recessional space, and their simultaneity of different images, led Marcel Duchamp to note that these works produce ‘a third dimension without resorting to perspective.’ Although the medium of Salomé is oil paint, it bears a remarkable filmy quality, which Picabia achieved by using thin washes, applying varnish to create layers, and effacing and repainting parts of the canvas. In keeping with his highly modern – even proto-postmodern – aesthetic strategies, the artist also painted Salomé with a distinct patina, imitating the sepia-toned veneer of a work discoloured by age. Such self-reflexivity – painting not only versions of other paintings, but also pastiching their material surfaces – marks Salomé as an intellectual work as much as it is a phantasmagorical one.

Picabia, who was notoriously capricious with his pictorial methods, abandoned the ‘transparencies’ only a few years later in 1932.