Promenade
- Artist: Ida Cadorin Barbarigo
- Date: 1963
- Medium: Oil paint on canvas
- Dimensions: support: 1467 x 967 mm
- Museum: Tate Modern
- Collection record: Tate Modern website
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About this artwork
This is the "Promenade" by Ida Cadorin Barbarigo, painted in 1963 as an oil on canvas. The work is built from a flurry of overlapping, calligraphic lines that sweep across a plain, muted background. Dark strokes cut through light, creating a subtle contrast that feels almost musical. The scene looks down from a high angle, showing loose circular tables and empty chairs that one might find on a pavement café in Venice or Paris. Those tables are the same motif Barbarigo explored in her earlier 1954 “Tables and Chairs” series, but here she moves into a more organic abstraction, blurring the line between representation and pure gesture. The composition is intentionally asymmetrical and even appears truncated by the frame’s edges, adding to its sense of suspension. It’s a snapshot of everyday absence—empty chairs that speak of presence and absence at once. The painting was part of the Women of Expressive Abstraction 1940‑1970 tour, and it remains a striking example of Barbarigo’s journey from geometric to fluid, calligraphic forms.
See it in person
Promenade is in the collection of Tate Modern on Bankside, London — free to enter. Point your phone at any artwork there and audioguide.london plays a free audio guide in six languages — no app download needed.
