From the dog to nothing you can name

In 1912, Giacomo Balla painted a dog. Not a noble dog, not a hunting dog, a dachshund, a little long-bodied sausage of a dog, trotting along on a leash beside its owner’s feet. He called it Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (Dinamismo di un cane al guinzaglio; it hangs today in the Buffalo AKG Art Museum in New York State). And it is one of the clearest pictures ever made of what it means to paint motion. The dog’s four little legs are blurred into a fan of repeated legs, the swinging chain of the leash is multiplied into a smear of arcs, the owner’s skittering feet are doubled and tripled. Balla had been looking hard at Étienne-Jules Marey, a French scientist who in the 1880s photographed animals and people in motion by catching many phases of one movement on a single plate, chronophotography, the ancestor of the flip-book and the film strip. The dog is Balla doing in oil paint what Marey did with a camera: showing a moving thing as all its positions at once.

Here is the key distinction. The dog is a picture of a thing in motion. You can still see the thing. It is recognizably a dachshund; you could pick it out of a line-up. Within roughly a year, Balla does something that sounds small and is in fact enormous: he keeps the motion and throws away the thing. By 1913–14 the dog is gone, the leash is gone, the feet are gone. The car is gone too, which is a problem, because the picture is about a car. What is left is the motion itself, lifted clean off any object, pure forces, pure lines, pure planes. That arrival point is the painting in front of us, Abstract Speed + Sound.

Balla was, at this point, the eldest of the Futurist painters. Futurism was the Italian art movement launched in 1909 that worshipped the modern machine age (the car, the tram, the electric light, the racing crowd) and demanded that painting stop showing gods and goddesses and start showing speed. (We will come to the uglier half of what else it demanded.) Balla had signed its painting manifestos in 1910 alongside younger men like Umberto Boccioni and Gino Severini. He was past forty, the patient one, the one who taught the others as much as he learned. And he was the one who took the movement’s slogan (paint speed) further toward its logical end than anyone else. The dog was a long stride in that direction. Abstract Speed + Sound is where he runs out of road and keeps going anyway.