Exhibition - On The Move: Visual­ising Action - Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art

TOM and Jerry may appear to have little in common with  the Italian Futurist movement that exploded on to the art scene at the end of the 19th century.
But on further inspection there is a clear link between the antics  of a cheeky mouse and a cat’s limp-pawed attempts to catch it, and artists who created a new style for a new century.
The link is movement: Tom and Jerry’s comic-violent antics are created by splicing a series of moving pictures together. How to represent action through art was what fascinated the Italian Futurists.
Now a new exhibition, curated by neurologist-turned-opera-director Dr Jonathan Miller, traces the history of movement through art, drawing on the collection at Islington’s Estorick Foundation in Canonbury Square.
It is a subject that has fascinated him throughout his life, Dr Miller, who lives in Camden Town, told me.
“I have always been interested in what we call action,” he says. “These are events peculiar to living things. It is different to the action of movement by things such as pebbles or clouds – I have always been drawn to the actions animals undergo or perform.”
It prompted him to study medicine – “I went into medicine to study Parkinson’s, strokes and paralysis” –  and develop an interest in conscious and unconscious forms of movement, as well as link with his other career as a theatre director: “I was interested in movement on stage,” he says, which in turn drew his to consider how movement is shown in art. “I wanted to look at the pictorial repres­entation of movement. Until photography – and even afterwards – pictures could not show movement. They could suggest it. You could inform the viewer of movement or guess what had happened, but the picture was static. Nothing moved.”
As his exhibition shows, with early photographic pioneers in the 1830s and 1840s, exposure times needed to create a plate were so long you could not capture someone walking across the sight lines of the lens. Then, as photography developed, so did the idea of capturing movement.
Dr Miller’s exhibition shows how the idea of investigating animal movement partly came from an eccentric Victorian photographer, Edward Muggeridge.
He travelled through America – bizarrely changing his name to Eadweard Muybridge in an attempt to sound more “Olde English” – and became known for his landscape photographs, bringing to people views of such natural wonders as the rock formations of the Yosemite Valley – which must have seemed as wondrous as images of the surface of Mars do to us today.
His work brought him to the attention of the governor of California, Leland Stanford, who was then the chairman of the Pacific Railroad group, explains Dr Miller. “Stanford was a horse enthusiast and was interested in the claim that at one point as a horse trots, no hooves are on the ground,” says Dr Miller. He approached Muybridge and he set about photographing Stanford’s prize-winning horse Occident using a series of cameras operated by trip wires to show that this was in fact the case. 
“They were interested in showing what had so far eluded the naked eye,” says Dr Miller. “The picture was not clear enough to be published – but was clear enough to prove the point.”
The concept was taken on by French physiologist étienne-Jules Marey, whose work also features.
“He was excited by what Muybridge had found,” says Dr Miller. 
“Where Muybridge represented the successive stages of motion in individual frames, Marey captured them on a single plate, creating overlapping, ‘chronophotographic’ images.”
This created the images of figures leaving wave like trails across the photograph, which can be seen in the show.
“From here, the Italian Futurist movement signalled the start of further study of the problems between static art such as painting and sculpture and how they showed the concept of movement,” adds Dr Miller.

• On The Move: Visual­ising Action is at the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, 39a Canonbury Square, N1,
from January 13-April 18. 020 7704 9522
DAN CARRIER