Do the locomotion

On the Move: Visualising Action
Estorick Collection, 39a Canonbury Square, London N1, until 18 April

The Estorick Collection, which specialises in modern Italian art, has mounted a series of rewarding exhibitions in recent years, all of which bear some essential relationship to its permanent holdings. Futurism remains the best known and most widely celebrated modern Italian art movement, and the current exhibition helps to put in context the Futurist obsession with recording movement through the static image. This display, curated by Jonathan Miller, offers a background to and explanation for the way in which the Futurists depicted movement by examining how animal locomotion was first represented and analysed through the developments in scientific photography.

It is essentially a photographic exhibition, and the two big stars of the show (and the accompanying catalogue, price £12.95) are Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey. Muybridge is familiar to art-lovers for the crucial inspiration he provided Francis Bacon, while the more scientific Marey is rather less known. The visitor to the exhibition is greeted in gallery one by a bronze flight of seagulls merging into each other. This dramatic and beautiful sculpture is by Marey, and is the culmination of his research into how birds actually fly. This ‘endless column’ of birds is like a spine with many wings, showing all the positions of flight from the nearly closed (wings underneath the body), to the full span at the sides, to the archetypal V arching over their backs. This sculpture is juxtaposed with John Wootton’s 18th-century painting ‘A Race on the Round Course at Newmarket’, in which the steeds are depicted in classic ‘rocking-horse’ stance, with front and back legs extended. Thus are the scientific approach (based on direct observation) and the artistic (based, in this case, on assumption) tellingly contrasted.