Les Oranges

Francis Picabia's 1909 still life painting, Les Oranges, is a meditation on the color and texture of citrus. The artist employed a range of brilliant hues, from marigold orange to butter yellow. He applied these pigments with thick brushstrokes in order to convey the fruit's waxy, dimpled skin. The white fabric of the background is similarly animated by staccato dashes of violet, lavender, peach and sky blue. The rhythmic surface of Picabia's painting invokes the still life paintings of Impressionist and Neo-Impressionists, from Gustave Caillebotte and Paul Cezanne to Vincent van Gogh. Picabia was also fascinated by the experimental color and brushwork of Pointillists and Fauvists; but according to art historian William A. Camfield, Picabia's work was distinguished from his predecessors by a "stronger sense of structure, order and permanence" (Francis Picabia, His Art, Life and Times, Princeton, 1979, p. 13).
Picabia was an artistic chameleon who moved through a number of different styles. He was also polylingual in various media, including printmaking and collage. Yet painting was Picabia's first and most important mode of formal exploration. He dabbled in several different genres: Impressionist landscapes, Cubist nudes, Surrealist fantasies and non-objective abstraction. Yet he was naturally also drawn towards the nature morte as a vehicle for formal exploration. Still life painting, one of the oldest and most traditional subjects in European art history, was ripe for reimagining in Picabia's hands at the dawn of the twentieth century.