Find the car. You can’t.

Start with the size and shape, because the shape is doing work before any of the paint does. The canvas is about three and a half feet tall and four and a half feet wide, noticeably wider than it is tall, a landscape format. That is not an accident. A car drives across, and Russolo gave it a canvas built like a stretch of road, a wide horizontal field for the thing to cross. The format itself is a runway.

Now try, honestly, to find the car. Go ahead and look for a wheel, a hood, a headlamp, a windscreen, the way you would in any normal picture of an automobile. You will not really find one. The vehicle has been shattered into faceted planes, broken into overlapping shards of form the way a sheet of glass breaks, so that there is no clean fender to point at and say there, that is the car. You read “car” from the title, and from the thrust, and from a denser knot of planes near the heart of the picture, but the machine as a recognizable object has nearly been let go. This is deliberate, and it is the first thing to surrender to: the subject of this painting is not a car. It is what a car does.

So what is on the canvas, if not a car? Wedges. Arrowheads. The picture is built, over and over, out of a single repeated shape: a V-shaped wedge, a chevron, nested and stacked and fanned out, all of them aimed the same way, in the direction the car is travelling. These are the force-lines made visible, the linee-forza, and here is how to actually see them do their job. Pick one wedge near the dense core of the picture, the busy knot the arrowheads seem to spring from. Follow the arrowheads outward from it, the way you would follow a row of road signs, each one a little farther along, a little more open. You are not looking at the shape of a car. You are looking at the shape of its push, the energy peeling off the front of the machine and spraying out into the air ahead of it. The car is not in the picture so much as the picture is the car’s wake.

And the wedges all lean. The whole composition tilts and drives one way across that wide canvas, so your eye does not get to sit calmly in the middle and admire; it gets caught by the slant of the wedges and pulled along the same line the car takes, shoved from the denser, busier end toward the open field ahead. You travel the painting the way the car travels the road. That is the trick of the thing. A still image, oil dried hard on cloth a century ago, has been engineered to make your eye accelerate.

Look next at how the color is handled, because it is the other half of the illusion. The hues are laid in flat-ish bands and planes, not modelled into rounded, lit, three-dimensional solids the way a traditional painter would shape an apple or a face. Each plane steps back from the leading edges like a stage in the car’s passage, one position, then the next, then the next. If you have ever seen a strip of film held up to the light, the same figure caught in a row of slightly-shifted frames, you already understand what Russolo is after. (That trick has a name and an ancestor: the chronophotograph, the late-1800s motion-study photographs, like Eadweard Muybridge’s galloping horse, that froze a moving body into a row of stills.) He is stacking the car’s positions into a single image, so that one canvas holds several instants at once. It is less a portrait of a thing than a diagram of motion, a blueprint of acceleration with the engineering left showing.

Pull back and take in the whole. There is no automobile to find, only the unmistakable sensation of one tearing past, built out of wedges that push, planes that step, and a slant that drags your eye down the road. That refusal, to drop the recognizable object entirely in favor of the pure experience of speed, is exactly how close this canvas comes to abstraction, painting that has stopped showing recognizable things at all. Russolo never quite crosses the line into total abstraction here, but he stands right on it, one foot over, in the same years that his fellow Futurist Giacomo Balla was painting the same speeding car into near-abstraction in his own 1913 speed studies.

Here is the last thing to feel, standing in front of it, and it is the thing that makes this particular speed painting worth a second look. Most pictures of motion want you to see the motion. This one seems to want you to hear it. The wedges have the quality of a sound spreading out, the planes pile up like a chord, the whole canvas reads like a visual transcription of a roar, the noise a car makes at full throttle. That is not a coincidence, and it is not a stretch. The man who painted this was about to stop painting altogether and spend the rest of his life on exactly that problem, how to capture the roar of the modern world, only with the brush put down and machines that actually made the sound picked up instead. This is a painting straining to become a noise.