Year 1912 (1912) Period Futurism | Created 1912 Genre History painting | |
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Subject The hand of a violinist in play Dimensions 56 cm × 78.3 cm (22 in × 30.8 in) Similar Giacomo Balla artwork, Futurism artwork | ||
The Hand of the Violinist (The Rhythms of the Bow) is a 1912 painting by Italian Futurist Giacomo Balla, depicting a musician's hand and the neck of a violin "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.
Balla was inspired to use multiplication to imply motion by the photographic experiments of Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey. As with other Futurists, he was also greatly inspired by Cubism'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's Nude Descending A Staircase.
From February to August 2014, the painting was part of an exhibit, Italian Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe, at the Guggenheim in New York.