Francis Picabia 'The Spring' 1912📍 MOMA, New York #art #artdaily #arthistory #histoyofart #artvlog

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]Incomprehensible, unreadable, ugly. That's how critics described The Spring by Francis Picabia.

[00:00:07]Whilst taking a long road trip with his [music] friends, the composer Claude Debussy and the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, Picabia started asking them questions about the possibilities of non-figurative art [music] and theories about color and shape.

[00:00:23]Inspired by this conversation, he created The Spring [music] in 1912, marking his move towards abstraction.

[00:00:30]Not a lot of people know, but The Spring began as a painting of three standing geometric figures. [music] But Picabia painted over the original composition, merging the figures and the ground, [music] confusing himself and the audience in the process. But cementing the influence of the new artistic movement, pioneered by Hilma af Klint and founded by Wassily Kandinsky, [music] abstract art polarized the society.

[00:00:55]Rightfully so, it was a whole new way of seeing [music] the world and creating it.