A dachshund, a lady in black, a Tuscan road

In May 1912, Balla was not in a city full of motorcars. He was in Montepulciano (pronounced “mon-teh-pull-CHA-no”), a small hilltop town in Tuscany, the rolling green region of central Italy near Siena, the kind of place with stone streets and a slow afternoon light and almost nothing the Futurists claimed to love. He was there as the guest of one of his pupils, the Contessa Nerazzini, in whose Tuscan house he was staying. And what he chose to paint, in this most un-mechanical of settings, was about the least futuristic subject imaginable: a woman walking her little dog.

The subject is a dachshund (the long-bodied, short-legged German breed, the “sausage dog”) on a leash, and the stepping feet of its owner, an elegant woman usually described as dressed in black. The museum’s own record supports the bones of the scene: the dachshund, the leash, the owner’s staccato steps, the month, the Tuscan road. (The black dress is the touch the popular literature adds, not the museum, which says only “the woman”; it is a fine and widely-repeated detail, just not a curatorial fact.) Where the popular books go further than anyone can is the next step: you will often see the walking lady identified asthe Contessa and the dog called hers. That leap the record does not actually make. The museum names the Contessa as Balla’s host, not as the figure in the picture, and is careful to call the dog only “his or her owner’s.” So: the host has a name, the scene has a dog and a leash and a lady in black, and whose dog it specifically was is the open part. That is the whole cast. There is no event, no drama, no machine. There is a person taking a small animal for a walk, and a painter watching the feet.

And then there is the ground they walk on. The bottom of the canvas is not a flat brown floor but a shimmer of pink-and-green strokes, which is usually read as the pale dust of the Tuscan road caught in the summer sun. This is the place giving itself away. A movement that prided itself on smoke and steel and the boulevard got one of its signature pictures out of country dust on a quiet road, painted by the divided-color habit(those separate strokes of pure color, meant to mix in your eye) Balla had been teaching for years. The technique is the avant-garde’s; the subject is a wiener dog in the Tuscan afternoon. The gap between those two things is the whole charm of the thing.