How to see speed and hear noise with no car present

The painting is small, about a foot and a half tall by two and a half feet wide, roughly the size of a large drawing board you might prop on your knees. It is painted in oil, not on canvas but on millboard (a stiff, heavy paperboard), and it is landscape orientation, wider than it is tall, which matters: a road runs sideways, and so does this picture. This is not a wall-sized declaration. It is a hand-sized one, and most of its force is packed into how the marks are laid down rather than into any grand scale.

Now the hard part: there is no car. You are going to look at a picture called Abstract Speed + Sound, about an automobile, and you will not find an automobile. So we have to learn to read it the way Balla built it, from the wake backward. Let your eye settle, and we’ll find the speed and the noise one piece at a time.

Start with the two big color zones, because they are the only steady ground you get. Low across the picture runs a band of green. That green is the earth, not a field, not a meadow, no grass or furrow you could name, just the single fact of land, reduced to its color. Above it, the blue is the sky. These are the same two landscape colors that, as we’ll see, run unbroken across all three panels of the larger work: green for ground, blue for air. But look at what the blue is doing. It does not lie flat like a real horizon. It bends. It curves into arcs, as if the sky itself has been grabbed and dragged into sweeping curves by something rushing through it. That is your first piece of the car: the air is bent. Something fast went through here and pulled the atmosphere out of shape behind it.

Now find the white. A pale channel cuts diagonally through the composition, and that is the road, the road the car you cannot see is traveling. (The road runs sideways across this landscape-format board, but Balla paints the channel itself as a diagonal slash, so the eye reads both at once: a sideways route, raked on a slant.) Laid along and around it are long, hard, directional strokes, all leaning the same way, all pointing down the road’s line. Balla called these the lines of force, his term for the trajectory of speed itself, the path the motion takes drawn as a thing you can see. This is the most important move in the picture, so let it land: those strokes are the car. Not a picture of the car, the car’s motion, made into marks. Follow the lines of force with your eye and you are physically tracing the route of the automobile, because the route is all that’s left of it.

Pull back and notice that almost everything in the picture leans the same direction. The lines lean; the planes (the flat shape-facets the forms break into) lean; the arcs of sky curve the same way the road runs. And here is the trick of it, it is a trick about repetition. One tilted line is just a tilted line. But Balla multiplies them, dozens of marks all raked the same way, and the repetition does something to your eye that a single mark never could: it shovesthe gaze along, faster and faster, the way a row of evenly spaced posts seen from a moving train seems to accelerate. The museum’s own description of what sets this central panel apart from its neighbors is exactly this, “the multiplication of the number of lines and planes.” More repetitions, more velocity. You are not being shown speed; you are being made to feel it, because your eye cannot rest and keeps getting flung forward.

Now look for where the lines stop agreeing with each other. Look for the marks that cross the speed-lines rather than running with them, a buzzing crisscross lattice, densest across the busiest stretch of the board where the forms pile up thickest. That crisscross is the noise, the “+ Sound” of the title, the roar of the engine made visible. It works precisely because it cuts against the grain: the speed-lines all flow one way, smooth, fast, and then this gridded buzz interrupts them, the way a loud noise interrupts a smooth motion in real life. You read it as texture rather than as picture, a kind of visual hum laid over the rush. The speed is in the strokes that flow; the sound is in the strokes that snag.

Last, do the thing nobody does: look at the frame. We are trained to treat a frame as the wall the painting lives behind, a neutral border, furniture. This one is not furniture. Balla painted his own frame, continuing the picture’s forms and colors right out onto it, so the green and the lines and the thrust do not stop at the canvas edge, they spill over onto the border and keep going. The museum describes the effect as implying “the overflow of the painting’s reality into the spectator’s own space.” Think about why that is the perfect ending for thispicture. Everything in it is about motion that will not be contained, speed, the car that won’t hold still long enough to be drawn, sound leaking everywhere. So the painting refuses to be contained either. It climbs out of its frame and into your room.

Pull all the way back now and take it in as one thing. No car, and yet a car, assembled out of the bent sky, the white road, the raking lines of force, the buzzing noise, the thrust that pushes your eye down the road and off the frame. This is the proof that the picture is pure abstraction and not a stylized drawing of an object: Balla painted the event (a fast loud thing passing) without painting the thing at all. You read the speed and you hear the noise, and there is nothing there to make either one except the marks.