Twenty legs on a wiener dog

The painting is not large. It is about three feet by three and a half feet, a bit wider than it is tall, roughly the size of a coffee-table top, and it is hung the wide way, landscape orientation, which gives the little dog room to travel across it. Stand in front of it and let your eye go where the picture pulls it, which is straight down to the bottom center, to the dog. So that’s where we’ll start.

Look at the legs first, because the legs are the whole joke and the whole argument at once. Under the dog’s body, where you expect to see four short dachshund legs, there is instead a dense brown blur, a fan of feet, a haze of paws, far too many of them, smeared into one another at the bottom of the canvas like the dog has sprouted a centipede’s worth of legs and is using all of them. Count them and you can’t; that is the point. Balla has painted not the four legs the dog has at any one instant but every position those four legs pass through in a fast little trot, all laid down on top of each other at once. The legs nearest the ground go to pure motion-blur, a brown smear; the ones higher up are slightly more distinct. The eye reads the whole fan, correctly, as feet moving too fast to freeze. You are looking at speed itself, painted.

Now follow the leash, the line that climbs up and to the right, from somewhere near the dog’s collar, angling across the picture toward the lady’s hand. Balla has done the same thing to it. It is not one taut line. It is a fan of curved arcs, a set of loops drawn one over another, because a leash on a walking dog swings, and Balla has caught several positions of that swing together. A single slack lead becomes a little nest of curves in the middle of the picture. This is the easiest place to watch the method work on something simple: the leash has no body, no fur, no anatomy to confuse you, just a thin moving line multiplied into the shape of its own motion. Once you see what he did to the leash, you understand what he did to the legs.

Lift your eye now to the top of the canvas, where the lady is. Or rather, where the lady almost isn’t. There is no face. There is no body. There is no figure standing there at all. There is only a staccato row of small dark shoes and the black hem of a skirt, the feet multiplied into a quick rhythm of steps moving left to right, the same trick as the dog’s legs but slower and tidier, a person’s stride rather than a dog’s scramble. The leash you just followed climbs from the dog up to her unseen hand, tying the two together across the picture. Balla has shown you a walking woman using nothing but her feet and the swing of her hem. You supply the rest of her yourself. It is a small, witty piece of restraint: he could have painted her whole and chose to paint her only as her motion.

So why does any of this read as a dog and not as a brown explosion? Because of one steady thing in the middle of all the blur. The dog’s long low body, the sausage itself, stays relatively solid and whole, a single dark recognizable shape, while the legs and the leash dissolve into repeated copies around it. That contrast is the engine of the picture. The still core holds the shape together; the moving parts fly apart into motion-blur around it. Your eye locks onto the solid body, reads “dog,” and then accepts the surrounding haze as the dog’s movement rather than as chaos.

And under all of it, the ground: not a flat color but a field of small pink-and-green strokes, the divided color of Balla’s Divisionist training (separate touches of color meant to mix in your eye, the thing he’d been teaching for years), usually read as the pale road dust of a Tuscan summer shimmering in the heat. The dog and the lady move across it and the road shimmers under them.

Now pull back and notice the rule, because once you see it the whole picture clicks open. Anything that moves, Balla paints as many overlapping copies of itself. Anything that stays still, he paints once. The legs move, so there are twenty of them. The leash swings, so it is a fan of arcs. The feet step, so they are a row of shoes. The body holds steady, so it stays single and solid. Multiply the moving, hold the still. That one rule, applied with a perfectly straight face to a small dog on a leash, is the entire method, and it is the simplest demonstration anywhere in the movement of what the Futurists meant by their favorite word, dynamism: not a picture of a moving thing, but a picture of the movement itself.