Francis Picabia entered the avant-garde art scene from 1909, indiscriminately alternating between Fauvism, Cubism, and a somewhat rough form of abstraction. An ambivalence in styles that became a characteristic trait throughout his career. In 1918, in Lausanne, Picabia published Poèmes et dessins de la fille née sans mère (Poems and Drawings by the Girl Born without a Mother), which reflected his interest in the realm of mechanics, machines without a purpose, and the identification between women and machines. Through the printer and editor Julius Heuberger, he came into contact with the Zurich Dada group, who propounded the negation of all positivist reasoning. Picabia’s useless and self-sufficient machines connected with their ideas. The artist played with geometric elements that were symmetrically distributed throughout the paper, generating a series of emblems and symbols of sorts with a hidden meaning.

The form is reminiscent of a grotesque female figure wearing a red dress and a skirt with fringes. The circles suggest arms and breasts, and the black dot resembles a disproportionate and muted head. A schematic landscape composed of the sky and some grass appears in the background.