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