The middle of a picture that runs off its own frame

Here is a fact that changes how you see everything we just looked at, and it comes with a warning attached. By the leading scholarly reconstruction, this is not a standalone picture at all. It is the central panel of a three-part work, a triptych (a picture made of three panels meant to be read together, a format that goes back to medieval altarpieces). The three panels show one continuous landscape (the same green earth, the same blue sky, the same white road) with a car passing through all three. This middle panel is the stretch where the multiplied lines and planes pile up thickest, which is exactly why it reads as the most intense of the three.

Now the warning. The triptych reading is proposed, not proven. The Peggy Guggenheim itself hedges carefully: it says the three-panel arrangement “has been proposed” and that this work “may have been” the central section. The titles wobble too. This panel is usually called Abstract Speed + Sound, but the Tate’s catalogue calls this same central panel Lines of Force + Noise, and the various panels get named differently from source to source. The whereabouts of the left-hand panel are not firmly documented. So treat the triptych the way you should treat any elegant reconstruction of something a century old, as the best current account, told by careful people, not as a fact carved in stone.

What is solid is the right-hand panel, and it is worth knowing about. It is called Abstract Speed (The Car has Passed (Velocità astratta) l’auto è passata), and it hangs in the Tate in London. The title alone tells you how the sequence reads: the car has passed, it is already gone, and on that panel the Tate notes pinkish areas that suggest the exhaust fumes the vanished car left hanging in the air. Read the three together and you get a little narrative of an automobile crossing a landscape (the car coming, the car at full pitch, the car gone but for its fumes) told entirely without ever drawing the car. The wake on the left, the roar in the middle, the smell on the right.

And this is where the painted frame, which had seemed like a clever flourish, stops being one and becomes the structural idea of the whole work. Balla painted the frames of the panels too, carrying the forms and colors out across the borders, so that the landscape does not break at each frame edge but flows on (panel to frame to next panel) one unbroken sweep of speed across all three. The frames, which would normally divide three pictures, instead connect them. The most distinctive feature of the single panel turns out to be the engineering of the whole.

(One more thing to keep straight, because it is a genuine trap. Balla painted a whole group of these abstract-speed pictures in 1913–14, not one canvas, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art owns a different Velocità astratta + rumore from the same years, a related work, not this one. They are cousins, not the same painting. The one we are reading is the Venice panel.)