Francis Picabia Dances at the Spring [II] Saint Cloud, spring or summer 1912

  • Not on view

Picabia wrote the title Dances at the Spring in French along the top right edge of this painting, providing viewers with a key to its highly abstracted subject matter. For Picabia, dance, along with music, provided an important model of an art form detached from photographic realism. Two semi-legible dancing figures are rendered in predominantly angular, crudely faceted, ruddy earth-tone color planes. Dances at the Spring was included in the landmark Armory Show in New York in 1913 and was later purchased by an American collector. According to a contemporaneous article in the New York Tribune, it was “most likely the first canvas of the ultra-moderns to find a permanent place in America.”

Gallery label from Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round so Our Thoughts Can Change Direction, 2016
Medium
Oil on canvas
Dimensions
8' 3 1/8" x 8' 2" (251.8 x 248.9 cm)
Credit
Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Collection, given by their family
Object number
1412.1974
Copyright
© 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
Department
Painting and Sculpture

Installation views

We have identified these works in the following photos from our exhibition history.

How we identified these works

In 2018–19, MoMA collaborated with Google Arts & Culture Lab on a project using machine learning to identify artworks in installation photos. That project has concluded, and works are now being identified by MoMA staff.

If you notice an error, please contact us at [email protected].

Provenance Research Project

This work is included in the Provenance Research Project, which investigates the ownership history of works in MoMA's collection.

1914 - 1915 (?), Francis Picabia, Paris.

[1915, Little Gallery of the Photo Secession, a.k.a. “291” (Alfred Stieglitz & Marius de Zayas), and/or Modern Gallery (Marius de Zayas), New York.]

1915 (?), Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer, Washington, D.C., and Mount Kisco, N.Y., probably acquired from Marius de Zayas.

1974, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, acquired as gift from Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer's family.

Provenance research is a work in progress, and is frequently updated with new information. If you have any questions or information to provide about the listed works, please email [email protected] or write to:

Provenance Research Project
The Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street
New York, NY 10019

Licensing

If you would like to reproduce an image of a work of art in MoMA’s collection, or an image of a MoMA publication or archival material (including installation views, checklists, and press releases), please contact Art Resource (publication in North America) or Scala Archives (publication in all other geographic locations).

MoMA licenses archival audio and select out of copyright film clips from our film collection. At this time, MoMA produced video cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. All requests to license archival audio or out of copyright film clips should be addressed to Scala Archives at [email protected]. Motion picture film stills cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. For access to motion picture film stills for research purposes, please contact the Film Study Center at [email protected]. For more information about film loans and our Circulating Film and Video Library, please visit https://www.moma.org/research/circulating-film.

If you would like to reproduce text from a MoMA publication, please email [email protected]. If you would like to publish text from MoMA’s archival materials, please fill out this permission form and send to [email protected].

Feedback

This record is a work in progress. If you have additional information or spotted an error, please send feedback to [email protected].