Bonheur de L'Aveuglement, La Chienne de Baskerville Picabia’s work evolved from a post mechano-morphic era where form and colour began to adopt a new machinist idiom. His work manipulated this idiom, testing its limits and capacity for representation until around 1923. His contemporary Léger influenced his practice, seeing the machine as an emblem of a new age, attracted to machine shapes for their intrinsic visual and functional qualities. He often used mechano-morphic images humorously as substitutes for human beings, creating a transmutation between man and machine that speaks of a modern metamorphosis. Picabia’s work is expressive, abstracted and ambitious, as he described how he ‘put his soul on canvas’ and that in his paintings ‘the public is not to look for a ‘photographic’ recollection of a visual impression...but to look at them as but an attempt to express the purest part of the abstract reality of form and colour.’