Movement

About

Still images have always had to suggest motion by implication. Gian Lorenzo Bernini's Apollo and Daphne (1622–25) freezes a chase at the instant the nymph's fingers turn to leaves, and Théodore Géricault's The Derby at Epsom (1821) stretches galloping horses into a flying leap that no horse actually makes.

Photography settled that question. Eadweard Muybridge's sequence of a galloping horse, made in California in 1878, showed all four hooves off the ground but gathered beneath the body, and Étienne-Jules Marey recorded successive phases of movement on a single plate. Painters absorbed the lesson: Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912) splits a figure into overlapping steps. Alexander Calder's mobiles, from the early 1930s, let sculpture move in real air, and Harold Edgerton's strobe photographs froze splashes and bullets too fast for the eye. Choreographers and artists such as Simone Forti later made movement itself the work.