''The Hand of the Violinist (The Rhythms of the Bow)'' is a 1912 painting by Italian
Futurist
Futurists (also known as futurologists, prospectivists, foresight practitioners and horizon scanners) are people whose specialty or interest is futurology or the attempt to systematically explore predictions and possibilities abou ...
Giacomo Balla
Giacomo Balla (18 July 1871 – 1 March 1958) was an Italian painter, art teacher and poet best known as a key proponent of Futurism. In his paintings he depicted light, movement and speed. He was concerned with expressing movement in his works, ...
, depicting a musician's hand and the neck of a
violin
The violin, sometimes known as a ''fiddle'', is a wooden chordophone (string instrument) in the violin family. Most violins have a hollow wooden body. It is the smallest and thus highest-pitched instrument (soprano) in the family in regular ...
"made to look like it's vibrating through space"—blurred and duplicated to suggest the motion of frenetic playing.
The painting, representative of Futurism's first wave, exhibits techniques of
Divisionism
Divisionism, also called chromoluminarism, was the characteristic style in Neo-Impressionist painting defined by the separation of colors into individual dots or patches which interacted optically..Homer, William I. ''Seurat and the Science of P ...
.
Balla was inspired to use multiplication to imply motion by the photographic experiments of
Eadweard Muybridge
Eadweard Muybridge (; 9 April 1830 – 8 May 1904, born Edward James Muggeridge) was an English photographer known for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion, and early work in motion-picture projection. He adopted the first ...
and
Étienne-Jules Marey
Étienne-Jules Marey (; 5 March 1830, Beaune, Côte-d'Or – 15 May 1904, Paris) was a French scientist, physiologist and chronophotographer.
His work was significant in the development of cardiology, physical instrumentation, aviation, cinema ...
.
As with other Futurists, he was also inspired by
Cubism
Cubism is an early-20th-century avant-garde art movement that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture. In Cubist artwork, objects are analyzed, broken up and reassemble ...
's methods of capturing multiple perspectives; ''The Hand of the Violinist'' has been said to bring the viewer "inside the reverberations of the instrument itself", and has earned comparison with
Marcel Duchamp
Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp (, , ; 28 July 1887 – 2 October 1968) was a French painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer whose work is associated with Cubism, Dada, and conceptual art. Duchamp is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso ...
's ''
Nude Descending a Staircase
''Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2'' (French: ''Nu descendant un escalier n° 2'') is a 1912 painting by Marcel Duchamp. The work is widely regarded as a Modernist classic and has become one of the most famous of its time. Before its first pres ...
''.
From February to August 2014, the painting was part of the exhibit ''Italian Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe'', at the
Guggenheim in New York.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Hand of the Violinist, The
Works by Giacomo Balla
Futurist paintings
1912 paintings
Paintings of people
Paintings in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Musical instruments in art