FUTURISM

GIACOMO BALLA 1871 - 1958

Born in Turin on July 18, 1871, Giacomo Balla studied music as a child and was mostly self-taught as an artist. His early, pre-Futurist period was influenced by the Pointilism of Georges Seurat and Italian Divisionism, a style developed by a group in northern Italy that shared Impressionism's concern with capturing the effects of light.

Balla was one of the founding members of the first wave of Futurist painters and was well established as a teacher, with Umberto Boccioni and Gino Severini among pupils. Balla's participation in the Futurist movement coincided with a dramatic change in his painting style, when in about 1909 he became preoccupied with the pictorial depiction of light, movement and speed as outlined by the Futurists primary objective to depict movement, which they saw as symbolic of their commitment to the dynamic forward thrust of the twentieth century. These paintings addressed themes of work and humanitarian issues, reflecting his Socialist politics. Through Futurism Balla celebrated the machine and his early futurist paintings were concerned with capturing figures and objects in motion. Balla attempted to realize movement by showing the forms in repeated sequence. Paintings, such as Dog on a Leash, got to grips with the problem of recreating speed and flight by superimposing images.

Leading up to 1914, he decomposed movement and light as his compositions gradually moved closer to total abstraction. By 1914 Balla was advocating a Futurist lifestyle - he even named his two daughters Propeller and Light - and his energies expanded to include sculpture and the applied arts.

In the 1920's, during the so-called "second wave of Futurism", Balla was still a compelling force within the ranks of the new, young Futurists, being the only artist of the first wave of Futurism to be involved in the second, post-war phase. Gradually giving more value to geometric forms, his style regularly alternated between abstract machine-like constructions and figurative representations. By the end of the decade he had distanced himself from the Futurist movement even though he co-signed the Manifesto of Aeropainting in 1929 (with Marinetti, Benedetta, Dottori, Depero, Fillia, Prampolini and others) and exhibited with them in 1931.

With increasing passion, Balla dedicated himself to decorative art. In 1920 Balla opened his Nicolò Porpora house to exhibit the first vividly coloured setting. Between 1921 and 1922 he designed the Tic-Tac Bal – a dance hall in futurist style, and in 1925 with Depero and Prampolini he took part at the Exposition des arts dècoratifs (decorative art exhibition) in Paris. He was so struck by Rodchenko and El Lissitsk’s Russian pavilion and “L’Esprit Nouveau” pavilion of Le Corbusier that this inspired him to create constructivist-inspired works such as “Enamoured numbers” (Numeri innamorati) in 1923, which is also close to the mechanical images of Ivo Pannaggi and Vinicio Paladini.

At the end of the 1930's, Balla broke away from Futurism, convinced that pure art has to express absolute realism, without which it would fall into an ornamental and decorative form. In spite of a brief period of success in the 1950's, during which his futurist works were esteemed by the younger generation of abstract painters, the “Origin” group, who arranged an exhibition of his works in 1951, Balla’s style remained figurative until his death. Giacomo Balla died in 1958.


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