Among the first, not the first
So how big a deal is this picture? Big, and it pays to be exact about why, because the easy claim is the wrong one. Balla is the Futurist who went furthest toward pure abstraction earliest, and these 1913–14 speed pictures are among the first fully abstract works in Italian painting, works with no recognizable object in them at all, built entirely from line, color and force. That is a real distinction and worth saying clearly.
What it is not is “the first abstract painting.” You will see that claim made, for this picture and for a dozen others, and it is always too neat. Abstraction did not have one inventor; it arrived in several places at nearly the same moment. In Munich, Wassily Kandinsky was pushing toward paintings of pure color and shape around 1910–13. In Paris, František Kupka and Robert Delaunay were doing their own versions of the same leap in the same years. (A generation of later artists (Malevich and others) would carry it further still.) Abstraction was less a single door someone opened than a tide that came in along the whole European coast at once. Balla’s speed pictures are one of the earliest waves, the Italian one, the one driven by the worship of the machine rather than by Kandinsky’s spiritual searching. When New York’s Museum of Modern Art mounted its great 2012 survey Inventing Abstraction, mapping all these simultaneous origins, this very work was in it, as one of many beginnings, which is the honest place to put it.
There is a harder half of the story that this picture cannot quite leave behind, and it would be dishonest to end on the pure beauty of the speed-lines without it. Futurism was not only an art movement; it was an ideology, and a violent one. Its founder, the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, launched it in 1909 with a manifesto that did not just celebrate speed and the machine, it glorified war as the world’s only hygiene, exalted danger and aggression, and sneered at museums as graveyards. That cult of speed-and-violence did not stay on the page. The Futurists campaigned for Italy to enter the First World War, and several of them died in it. And Marinetti himself went on, a decade later, to help write the 1919 founding manifesto of Italian Fascism(with the syndicalist Alceste De Ambris, for Mussolini’s new movement). The thrill of the racing car in Balla’s picture (the worship of pure forward motion, the impatience with everything old and slow and human) runs out of the same engine that powered all of that. The beauty is real. So is what it was harnessed to.
The painting itself, mercifully, can be allowed to be itself. It hangs now in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice (the modern-art museum the American collector Peggy Guggenheim built in her palazzo on the Grand Canal) a small board, about a foot and a half by two and a half feet, with its painted frame intact, on view. Stand in front of it and the politics fall away for a moment and you are left with the original astonishment: a man in 1913 looked at a noise and a speed, two things you cannot see, and found a way to make you see them both, in a picture of a car with no car in it, that refuses to stop at its own edge.