Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash

A little dachshund out for a walk, its legs blurred into a brown fan of motion and its leash a swarm of swinging arcs, made by the movement that worshipped the racing car and the machine gun. Futurism’s most beloved, and most unexpectedly funny, picture of pure speed.

1. 1
   The multiplied dog legs

   Lower center, the dense brown blur beneath the dachshund’s body, where the legs should be

   The dog’s four short legs are smeared into a fan of maybe twenty overlapping positions, a brown haze of feet. This is the painting’s clearest single illustration of the manifesto’s claim that a running horse has not four legs but twenty: every leg-position the eye would catch in a fast trot, laid down at once. Persistence of vision made paint.
2. 2
   The swinging leash arcs

   Center, the curving lines running from the lady’s hand down to the dog

   The leash is not one line but a set of repeated curves, the arcs of its swing captured together, so a single slack lead becomes a fan of loops. It is the same multiply-the-moving device applied to a thin moving object instead of a body, and it is the easiest place to watch Balla’s whole method work on something simple.
3. 3
   The lady’s stepping feet

   Upper register, the row of small dark shoes and the black skirt-hem moving left to right

   Above the dog, the owner is present only as a flicker of feet and the black hem of her skirt, her steps multiplied into a staccato row of shoes. There is no face, no body, no figure, just the rhythm of the walking. Balla shows the walker by her motion alone.
4. 4
   The trotting dachshund body

   Center, the single fairly solid dark sausage-shaped form the legs hang from

   Unlike the dissolved legs and the smeared leash, the dog’s long low body stays relatively whole and recognizable, the still core the motion-blur radiates out from. That contrast, solid body and exploded legs, is exactly how the eye reads the whole shape as one trotting dog rather than a brown smudge.
5. 5
   The pavement, the Tuscan road

   The whole ground plane the figures cross, streaked pink and green

   The ground is not a flat color but a field of pink-and-green strokes, often read as the pale summer dust of the Montepulciano road catching the light. It also keeps Balla’s old divided-color habit alive: color built from separate strokes meant to mix in the viewer’s eye rather than on the palette.
6. 6
   Repetition as the whole method

   Everywhere at once, comparing the blurred legs, leash and feet against the solid body

   Step back and the trick is the same all over the canvas: anything moving is painted as many overlapping copies of itself, and anything still stays single. Multiply the moving, hold the still. That one rule is the entire engine of the picture, and the simplest demonstration of why Futurism called this dynamism.