Dynamism
A sense of energy, force and motion in a work, carried by diagonals, spirals, repeated forms and restless composition.
1 work · 10 related artists
About
Dynamism is the feeling that a picture or sculpture is in motion even though nothing moves. Baroque artists built it from diagonals and twisting bodies: Peter Paul Rubens's The Raising of the Cross (1610–11) drives a heaving mass of figures up a steep slant, and Gian Lorenzo Bernini caught figures mid-action in marble.
The word became a programme for the Italian Futurists after 1909. Umberto Boccioni's Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913) strides forward as if shaped by the wind, and Giacomo Balla's Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912) multiplies legs and a swinging lead into a flurry of repeated shapes, borrowing from chronophotography. In the 1930s aeropainters such as Tullio Crali painted plunging views from the cockpit. Abstract painters raise the same charge with slashing brushwork and off-balance layouts. Look for diagonals, spirals, repetition and forms that seem to break out of their own edges.