Abstract Speed + Sound

A speeding car you never see: only the green earth, the blue sky, the white road and the buzzing crisscross of its noise, painted right out onto the frame so the motion never stops at the edge.

1. 1
   The green landscape band

   The lower zone, the broad green forms beneath the speed-lines

   The green stands for the earth the car races across, one of the two landscape colors (green for land, blue for sky) carried through all three panels of the triptych. It is a form, not a depicted field, no furrows, no fence, no farm. This is the giveaway that you are looking at abstraction and not scenery: the land has been reduced to the single fact of its color.
2. 2
   The white road and the lines of force

   The pale diagonal channel cutting through the composition

   The pale channel slicing across the picture is the white road the unseen car travels, and the long directional strokes laid along it are Balla’s lines of force, his name for the trajectory of speed itself. Follow them with your eye and you are following the car, because the strokes are all the car you are ever going to get.
3. 3
   The swept sky arcs

   The upper zone, the curving blue forms

   Blue is the second landscape color, the sky, but it does not sit still like a real horizon. The arcs read as atmosphere bent and swept by the car’s passage, the air itself dragged into curves by something moving through it fast. You are seeing wind, in a picture with no flag and no leaf to show it.
4. 4
   The painted frame that won’t stop the picture

   The border all the way around the panel

   This is the single most distinctive thing in the work, and it is easy to miss because we are trained to ignore frames. Balla painted his own frame as a continuation of the picture’s forms and colors, so the composition runs off the canvas and onto its border, what the museum describes as implying the overflow of the painting’s reality into the spectator’s own space. The motion is not allowed to end at the edge. That is the whole Futurist point about speed, built into the carpentry.
5. 5
   The directional thrust

   Across the whole field, the repeated lines and planes all leaning the same way

   Almost every line and plane leans the same direction, and the repetition does the work: multiply a tilt enough times and the eye is shoved along it whether it wants to go or not. The museum’s own phrase for how this central panel differs from its flanking ones is the multiplication of the number of lines and planes. More repetitions, more velocity. The picture pushes you down the road.
6. 6
   The car that is not there

   Look for the car, and there isn’t one

   The entire subject is a speeding automobile, and there is no car. No wheel, no headlamp, no road-sign, no driver, no figure of any kind. Speed is carried only by the force-lines, the disturbed green and blue, and the crisscross of noise, with pinkish exhaust appearing on the Tate’s right-hand panel. This absence is the proof the work is pure abstraction and not a stylized picture of a thing: Balla painted the event without painting the object.