Giacomo Balla

(b Turin, 18 Aug 1871; d Rome, 1 March 1958). Italian painter, sculptor, stage designer, decorative artist and actor. He was one of the originators of Futurism (see FUTURISM,

See the Abbreviations for further details.

The Italian painter Giacomo Balla (1871-1958) was one of the founders of futurism, an Italian art movement.

Giacomo Balla was born on July 24, 1871, in Turin. He was already appreciated as an academic painter when he first encountered impressionist and divisionist painting during a visit to Paris at the turn of the century. The problems of light and color intrigued him. On his return to Rome he enthusiastically imparted his new-found postimpressionist theories to the painters Gino Severini and Umberto Boccioni. The poet F. T. Marinetti converted Balla to futurism.

Futurism was a movement with a program of belligerent modernism, both in an ethical and esthetic sense. A determined acceptance of the age of the machine and an admiration of speed were its main points. As a style, futurism evolved from the revolutionary tenets of analytical cubism. It brought to modern art an emphasis on the visualization of the kinetic principle and a contempt for all traditional modes of esthetic expression. Thus Marinetti declared: "We have already put behind us the grotesque burial of passéist Beauty… We shall sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and boldness. … We declare that the world's splendor has been enriched by a new beauty, the beauty of speed. A speeding motor car … is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace."

Although Balla was one of five painters who signed the Futurist Manifesto of 1910, he did not take part (despite the fact that his name figured in the catalog) in the important exhibition of futurist painting in Paris in 1912. It was Balla, however, who that year painted the first, most original, and somewhat witty visual depiction of movement in the novel futurist manner; it depicted the legs of a lady and a dog on a leash in successive phases of the action of walking. Another painting in a similar style was Rhythm of the Violinist.

A more complex interpretation of the kinetic principle occurred to Balla after reading Severini's Expansion sphérique dans l'espace (Spherical Expansion in Space). In 1913/1914 Balla showed a marked preference for massive scrolls, with the help of which he re-created the illusion of depth. Also dating from this period are his cosmogonic themes (such as Mercury Passing in front of the Sun), which are among the most abstract pictures produced by the futurists.

During the 1920s Balla remained faithful to the futurist movement. Later on he painted figurative compositions and abstract studies. What he aimed at as a mature artist was a synthesis of physical movement and emotional and mental attitudes. Balla lived most of his life in Rome, where he died on March 6, 1958.

Further Reading

Information on Balla is in Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Cubism and Abstract Art (1936); James Thrall Soby and Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Twentieth-CenturyItalian Art (1949); and Raffaele Carrieri, Avant-Grade Painting and Sculpture (1890-1955) in Italy (1955) and Futurism (1961; trans. 1963).

Balla is often portrayed as a painter closely associated with Italian Futurism although in fact, like a number of others associated with the group, his work crossed into a number of creative disciplines including fashion and the applied arts. In 1914 he wrote the Manifesto on Menswear, later retitled Antineutral Clothing, a dramatic exhortation to dispense with the mundaneity of everyday menswear in favour of dynamic, expressive, and aggressive Futurist clothing. Like his fellow Futurists he sought to sweep away all vestiges of Italy's cultural heritage in favour of an emphatically 20th-century way of life. He conceived of Futurist menswear as allowing its wearers to respond to mood changes through ‘pneumatic devices that can be used on the spur of the moment, thus everyone can alter his dress according to the needs of his spirit’. It could also be animated by electric bulbs. He had an exhibition at the Casa D'Arte Bragaglia in Rome in 1918, in conjunction with which he co-published his Colour Manifesto. He was also committed to Futurist applied arts and furniture, brightly painted and with richly animated surfaces, and showed them at his Futurist House in 1920, the year in which he collaborated on the journal Roma futurista. He also exhibited at the Paris Exposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels of 1925 and the International Exhibition at Barcelona in 1929. However he failed to get his Futurist designs put into mass production and during the 1930s gradually distanced himself from such an outlook.

Giacomo Balla
Giacomo Balla, Abstract Speed + Sound 1913-1914
Born	July 18, 1871(1871-07-18) Turin, Italy
Died	March 1, 1958 (aged 86) Rome, Italy
Nationality	Italian
Field	Painting
Movement	Futurism
Influenced by	Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

Giacomo Balla (July 18, 1871 – March 1, 1958) was an Italian painter.

Biography

Born in Turin, in the Piedmont region of Italy, the son of an industrial chemist, as a child Giacomo Balla studied music.

At 9, when his father died, he gave up music and began working in a lithograph print shop. By age twenty his interest in art was such that he decided to study painting at local academies and exhibited several of his early works. Following academic studies at the University of Turin, Balla moved to Rome in 1895 where he met and married Elisa Marcucci. For several years he worked in Rome as an illustrator and caricaturist as well as doing portraiture. In 1899 his work was shown at the Venice Biennale and in the ensuing years his art was on display at major Italian exhibitions in Rome and Venice, in Munich, Berlin and Düsseldorf in Germany as well as at the Salon d'Automne in Paris and at galleries in Rotterdam in the Netherlands

Influenced by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Giacomo Balla adopted the Futurism style, creating a pictorial depiction of light, movement and speed. He was signatory to the Futurist Manifesto in 1910 and began designing and painting Futurist furniture and also created Futurist "antineutral" clothing. He also taught Umberto Boccioni. In painting, his new style is demonstrated in the 1912 work titled Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash. Seen here, is his 1914 work titled Abstract Speed + Sound (Velocità astratta + rumore). In 1914, he also began sculpting and the following year created perhaps his best known sculpture called Boccioni's Fist.

During World War I Balla's studio became the meeting place for young artists but by the end of the war the Futurist movement was showing signs of decline. In 1935 he was made a member of Rome's Accademia di San Luca. Balla participated in the documenta 1 1955 in Kassel, Germany, his work was also shown postmortem during the documenta 8 in 1987.

References

• Maurizio Fagiolo Dell'Arco, Balla: The Futurist (1988)

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Giacomo Balla

• Guide to Balla's paintings, at Artcyclopedia
• Abstract Speed + Sound by Giacomo Balla, Guggenheim Museum

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)