Motion Lines: Depicting movement in the early 20th century

18 Nov. 2026, Université Paris Nanterre

Modernist literary and artistic productions can be historically situated and analyzed in a context of rapidly changing technology, which affected the ways in which bodies were represented. With the fast pace imposed by modern cadences of experience, work, or artistic practices, writers and visual artists alike started showing a particular interest in the dynamics of bodies and objects. In order to picture this, they stressed the importance of lines and trajectories, and their relevance across various media. The visual dimension of this concern with movement is evident and tightly connected to literary practices that emphasized showing over telling, such as Hemingway’s terse prose and the poems of the Imagists.

Indeed, many early twentieth-century—and even some late-nineteenth-century—literary and artistic productions were endeavors to depict moving bodies and objects, in keeping with the rapidly-changing context in which they emerged. Whether one thinks about Charles Baudelaire’s figure of the flâneur, George Bellows’s boxers, the trains and cars in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), or the figure in Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (1912), in each of these instances, movement is the primary energy that is put across to the viewer or reader. In all of them there is a noticeable preoccupation with the lines (whether poetic or artistic) which convey the dynamics of the work. With regard to this, the focus of many artists and writers on physical culture and performance can be understood in the wider socio-cultural context of the development of physical education and sports such as calisthenics, weightlifting, fencing or boxing, to name but a few.

Vorticists and Futurists shared this preoccupation with rapidly moving technology and machines. Foremost among them was Marinetti who declared in 1909: “We will sing […] of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; […] deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.” (“The Futurist Manifesto”, 1909). Here, movement creates new lines which, in turn, transform technological objects into almost mythical beasts (“smoke-plumed serpents” and “enormous steel horses”). Like Marinetti and the Futurist painters who followed his creed, early-twentieth-century photographers often attempted to capture the impression of movement, as is visible in Alfred Stieglitz’s The Hand of Man (1902). In addition, many modernist sculptors such as Constantin Brancusi, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, George Epstein and Umberto Boccioni with his Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913) also strove to suggest motion in their works and, in that endeavor, line superseded figuration. If the lines are not meant to depict identifiable figures or definable objects, do lines ultimately represent movement itself? Can one represent sheer dynamics in an abstract fashion, without focusing on a particular agent through which movement can be perceived, as in abstract cubism?

Representing movement and the fast pace of modern life sometimes takes on an ideological dimension and becomes a guiding principle, as in Ezra Pound’s early poetry, where cadence, and, with it, ease of movement, becomes a criterion for beauty, and artistic lines are transposed into poetry, as he explains in the introduction to his own Sonnets and Ballate of Guido Cavalcanti: “I would liken Guido’s cadence to nothing less powerful than line in Blake’s drawing. […] Rodin’s belief that energy is beauty holds thus far, namely, that all our ideas of beauty of line are in some way connected with our ideas of swiftness or easy power of motion, and we consider ugly those lines which connote unwieldy slowness in moving” (Poems and Translations 193, 1912). This preference for the depiction of swift movement contrasts with the temporality of the making of an artwork, an act that is often slow and labored, for both the poet and the sculptor, a fact which Pound highlighted in the second section of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920).

Motion is also a major aspect of art forms that blend text and image—many of which came to prominence precisely in the early twentieth century—for example, comics, visual poetry or early silent films. With the exception of visual poetry, these art forms were often considered mainstream rather than highbrow. How and to what extent did that conception play into their representation of motion? In these complex media, movement often takes on a specific meaning. For instance, in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, it is specifically the dull repetition of gestures that drives the plot. How do the lines one finds in these complex media differ from other single-medium art forms? More specifically, is the cinema an art form which is peculiarly apt to convey the human experience of time as constant movement? That is what the philosopher Henri Bergson seemed to imply when he wrote of “the cinematographical mechanism of thought” through which our mind transforms snapshots of reality into something that appears “as a perpetual becoming” (Creative Evolution, 1907, 1911). How did other art forms represent that same phenomenological experience? Did they move away from the linearity that seems to be inherent in this process?

Bergson’s focus on thought also reminds us of the emergence of psychology as a new field of study in that very era. Looking inward often resulted in a questioning of the linearity of time and of the self’s evolution. Indeed, writers interested in psychology and psychoanalysis such as H.D. sometimes chose to focus on circular motion in their works; for instance, the spiral stairs are a recurring motif in H.D.’s late poem Helen in Egypt. Spiraling movement is also associated with speed and strong force, and such a connection is found in Pound’s motif of the vortex and Yeats’s gyres, both of which are tied to the idea of powerful cultural forces shaping human life.

Finally, one may prefer to focus on instances when motion is arrested or interrupted, and how pauses are represented, as in Hemingway’s In Our Time (1924), in which the main character’s progress is constantly being impeded, for example. What temporality do they suggest in relation to movement? Stasis and pauses become all the more noticeable amidst movement within a single work, yet how does one also interpret the switch from stasis to movement in the corpus of one artist or writer? There is a definite contrast, for example, between the abrupt, right-angle lines of Vorticist Wyndham Lewis’s cover for Blast (1914-15) and his relaxed, reclining, more personal portrait of Ezra Pound sleeping (1939) or the curved lines of his Dancers (1912).

This conference will seek to investigate the ways in which various lines (poetic and artistic) have suggested movement or its absence in early-twentieth-century literary and artistic productions.

Contributions may focus on, but do not need to be limited to, the following:

-        The various depictions of movement in artistic and literary lines

-        Recurring ways to convey lines of movement

-        The representation of lines of motion specific to new forms and objects at the beginning of the twentieth century, i.e. technology, artistic performance and drama, physical culture, danse, etc.

-        The complexity of motion lines in media containing both text and image

-        The lines created by the artistic use of contrast between stillness and movement

-        The notion of linearity in relation to time: how do various art forms seek to depict lines of motion that offer an escape from the supposedly imperative linearity of time?

Please send a short bio-bibliography and abstract (400 words max) to Charlotte Estrade cestrade@parisnanterre.fr and Emilie Georges emilie.georges@protonmail.com by July 1st, 2026. Notification of acceptance will be sent within a fortnight.

Bibliography

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Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translation by Richard Howard. New York, Hill and Wang, 1981.

Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Translation by Arthur Mitchell. New York: Henry Holt And Company, 1911.

---. Translation by Mabelle L. Andison. The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics. North Chelmsford, Courier Corporation, 2010.

---. La Pensée et le mouvant. Paris, Presses Universitaires Françaises, [1938] 2013.

Israel, Nico. Spirals: The Whirled Image in Twentieth-Century Literature and Art. Columbia UP, 2015.

Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso. Marinetti: Selected Writings. Edited by R.W. Flint. Translated by R.W. Flint and Arthur A. Coppotelli. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. R, 1972.

Perloff, Marjorie. The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Pound, Ezra. “Vorticism.” Fortnightly Review 96, 1 September 1014, p. 461-471. https://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/vorticism/

Thacker, Andrew. “Traffic, gender, modernism.” The Sociological Review, 16 Sept. 2016.  

https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.2006.00643.x