The charming picture from a violent movement

The painting’s life as an object, the provenance (the documented chain of who owned a work, from the painter’s hand to where it hangs now), starts where a lot of early Futurism started: Berlin. In 1913 the dog made its international debut at the Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon (the “First German Autumn Salon”), a big survey of new European art mounted by the dealer Herwarth Walden at his Galerie Der Sturm, the gallery and magazine that did more than almost anyone to carry the new movements across Europe. And there is a small perfect irony in where it ended up on that wall: the painting that had learned everything it knew about motion from photography was hung, on its debut, right beside a photograph.

Then a crossing. In 1938, the painting was bought directly from Balla by A. Conger Goodyear (1877–1964), an American industrialist who happened to be the first president of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. (No purchase price is documented, so we won’t invent one. The popular shortcut that the painting went straight from the artist to its museum is also wrong: it went through the Berlin gallery and then through Goodyear’s private collection first.) When Goodyear died in 1964, his bequest split the work, a life interest to George F. Goodyear and the painting itself to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, which assigned it the accession number 1964:16. George F. Goodyear completed the gift, handing over his life interest, in December 1984. And in 2023 the Albright-Knox reopened after a major expansion under a new name, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, which is where the dog trots today, accession number unchanged.

The picture’s reputation took a while to settle. Mid-century critics were unimpressed: in the 1940s it was dismissed as crude and as a cliché of modern art, the multiplied legs read by some as a gimmick that had dated. By 2014the mood had flipped, and the same device was being called one of the most elegant and accurate things ever painted in the Futurist tradition. What didn’t change is that this became, by a wide margin, the Futurist painting that ordinary people actually love, the one that gets onto the postcards and the tote bags, which is worth sitting with for a moment, because it is genuinely strange.

Here is the strangeness, and it should not be sanded off. Futurism was not a gentle movement. Marinetti’s 1909 founding Manifesto of Futurism didn’t just praise the racing car; it glorified violence, the machine gun, contempt for the past, and war, which it called “the world’s only hygiene.” Several of the Futurists, Marinetti among them, would later attach themselves to Italian Fascism. This was an avant-garde that meant the aggression in its slogans. And out of that same movement, with the same multiply-the-motion technique meant to capture the speed of the modern machine, came a charming, almost comic picture of a dachshund out for a walk. The cuteness and the ideology sit in the same body of work, and the honest thing is to hold both: the dog really is delightful, and the movement that made it really did cheer for war. The picture is not innocent of its movement. It is just the friendliest face that movement ever put on.

And maybe that is exactly why it lasts. Most Futurist paintings ask you to thrill to a force you may not actually want to thrill to, the speeding car, the surging crowd, the war as cleansing. The dog asks nothing of the kind. It takes the movement’s one genuinely new idea, that you can paint movement itself rather than a thing that happens to be moving, and spends it on the smallest, most harmless, most universally recognizable scene there is: somebody’s little dog, hurrying to keep up, on a leash, on a sunny road. The twenty legs are doing serious avant-garde work. They are also, unmistakably, a wiener dog in a hurry. That is the joke, and it is a good one, and it has outlasted nearly everything louder around it.