Money Is The Reason For Work (Le Salaire est la Raison du Travail)

Francis Picabia was a key protagonist in the Paris Dada movement and a catalyst in the initial break that turned Surrealism into an independent group. In the years after World War II, amid the immense popularity of abstraction in modern art, he began his “dot-paintings,” in which the circles that had appeared in his earlier Dada works were stripped of extraneous detail. While the lack of finish visible in these paintings aligned them with the contemporary “crude” techniques championed by Jean Dubuffet, Picabia’s dots introduced a kind of figurative reference into these seemingly abstract pictures. A previous dot painting can be made out under this one; another signature and date are visible upside-down at the upper right-hand corner of the canvas, dated to the same year. This literally multi-layered, self-referential approach was perhaps inspired by the artist’s involvement in his own retrospective exhibition at the Galerie René Drouin earlier in 1949.

Picabia downplayed the significance of the titles of his dot paintings, saying, “some people named ‘Brown’ are blond.” However, other titles in this series—such as Good and Bad Are the Prejudices of Critics and Painting Without a Future—extend the critique of the institution of art implied in the title of this painting.