Painting the roar

The most quoted line Futurism ever produced is about a car. In the Manifesto of Futurism, published in French on the front page of the Paris newspaper Le Figaro on 20 February 1909, Marinetti wrote, in point four:

“We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath (a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot) is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.”

The Victory of Samothrace is one of the most beloved sculptures on Earth, a winged marble goddess from the second century B.C. that stands at the top of a grand staircase in the Louvre, the great Paris museum, with her robes blown back as if she had just landed. To say a motorcar was more beautiful than herwas a calculated outrage, the kind of sentence engineered to make a respectable reader spit out his coffee. The “grapeshot” in the quote is clustered iron shot blasted from a cannon, so the car seems to ride on an explosion. (Translators have fought over the exact words ever since, “grapeshot” or “machine-gun fire,” “Victory” or “Winged Victory,” so the version above is one careful published rendering, not a fact carved in marble.) But the provocation underneath is clear enough: the new age has a new beauty, and it has an engine.

This painting is Russolo taking that sentence at its word. The Futurist program had declared the racing car the most beautiful thing of the modern age; Russolo set out to paint the car’s beauty, which is its speed. Not a portrait of a car, the way a coachbuilder might want it, gleaming and parked. The opposite. He wanted the thing you cannot photograph, the roar and the rush, the way a car at full throttle stops being an object and becomes a streak of force tearing a hole in the air.

To do it, Russolo reached for the device the Futurist painters had invented for exactly this problem: the force-line, in Italian the linea-forza. A force-line is a directional line that carries an object’s movement and energy out past the edges of the object itself, into the space all around it, so that the painting shows not a frozen pose but the passage of a thing through space. Boccioni’s Technical Manifesto of 1910 had called for putting “the spectator in the centre of the picture” and rendering “universal dynamism”, by which they meant: stop painting nouns, start painting verbs. A normal painter draws a car. A Futurist draws driving.

Picture the difference with a humbler example. If you wanted to paint a thrown stone the ordinary way, you would paint a stone, sitting still, and trust the title to tell us it was thrown. The Futurist way is to paint the whole arc, the streak, the wind it shoves aside, so the throw is on the canvas and the stone is almost beside the point. Russolo built this picture out of force-lines the same way, repeated wedges and arrowheads driving across the canvas, each one a little vector of the car’s push. By the time he was done, the car had nearly disappeared into the speed it was making, which was precisely the plan.

And here is the wry footnote the catalogue keeps. Russolo signed and dated the canvas 1911, in paint, in his own hand. The museum that owns it today does not believe him; it dates the work 1912–13 and marks his painted date with a flat little scholarly [sic], the curatorial equivalent of a raised eyebrow. So the picture carries two dates at once, the artist’s and the museum’s, and we go with the museum’s, while enjoying the small fact that even the date on a Futurist painting refuses to sit still.