Francis Picabia The Spring Saint Cloud, spring or summer 1912
Picabia painted La Source (The Spring) after taking a long road trip with two friends, the composer Claude Debussy and the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, in the summer of 1912. On the way home, as the conversation among the three men turned to the possibilities of nonfigurative art, Picabia had demanded of his more skeptical companions, "Are blue and red unintelligible? Are not the circle and the triangle, volumes and colors, as intelligible as this table?" He began work on La Source soon afterward and showed it that October at an important annual exhibition in Paris, the Salon d'Automne. Also including abstract works by František Kupka and Fernand Leger, that year's edition of the Salon marked the public debut of abstraction in the city.
La Source invokes the painting of Pablo Picasso in both its Rose Period palette and its fragmented planes, yet its large scale, crude paint handling, and erotic undertones, along with its defiant breach of the figurative tradition, also suggest a parody of Cubism's refinement. Upon seeing La Source, a critic wrote that Picabia had "set the year's record for fantasy" with "ugly" works that "evoke incrusted linoleum."
Gallery label from Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925, December 23, 2012–April 15, 2013.
8' 2 1/4" x 8' 2 1/8" (249.6 x 249.3 cm)
Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Collection, given by their family
Francis Picabia has 73 works online.
There are 2,409 paintings online.
Installation views
We used machine learning to identify this work in photos from our exhibition history.
Four Recently Discovered Picabias and Other Modern Master Acquisitions January 25–April 22, 1980
Four Recently Discovered Picabias and Other Modern Master Acquisitions January 25–April 22, 1980 1 other work identified
Selections from the Permanent Collection: Painting and Sculpture May 17, 1984–August 4, 1992 1 other work identified
Selections from the Permanent Collection: Painting and Sculpture May 17, 1984–August 4, 1992 2 other works identified
Max Ernst: Dada and the Dawn of Surrealism March 14–May 2, 1993 1 other work identified
Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925 December 23, 2012–April 15, 2013 1 other work identified
Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925 December 23, 2012–April 15, 2013
Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round so Our Thoughts Can Change Direction November 21, 2016–March 19, 2017
Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round so Our Thoughts Can Change Direction November 21, 2016–March 19, 2017 1 other work identified
How we identified these works
MoMA collaborated with Google Arts & Culture Lab on a project using machine learning to identify artworks in installation photos.
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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 provenance@moma.org or write to:
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