Giacomo Balla

Giacomo Balla (Turin, July 18, 1871 – Rome, March 1, 1958) was an Italian painter, sculptor, set designer, and author of free words (paroliberi), a central figure in the twentieth-century Futurist movement. Born to Giovanni and Lucia Giannotti, he showed a marked interest in art from adolescence, attending a three-year course at the Regia Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti in Turin, where he met artists such as Pellizza da Volpedo. His early training was deeply influenced by the Divisionist environment of Turin and his father's passion for photography, which drew him toward social themes and the world of the marginalized. In 1895 Balla permanently left Turin to move to Rome with his mother, where he remained for the rest of his life and where he established himself as a pioneer of Divisionist technique, quickly attracting talented students including Umberto Boccioni, Gino Severini, and Mario Sironi, whom he met at the Scuola di nudo on via Repetta. In his early Roman period, he painted masterworks of Verista inspiration such as La Pazza (1905), maintaining the ethical and social commitment that characterized his artistic research. The decisive turning point in Balla's career came in 1909, when Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published the Manifesto of Futurism in Le Figaro. In 1910 Balla subscribed to the Manifesto of Futurist Painters and Futurist Painting, fully adhering to the avant-garde movement. During this period of great creativity, he created some of his most celebrated masterpieces, including Girl Running on a Balcony, Arc Lamp (1909-1911), The Hand of the Violinist (1912), and the celebrated Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912), works that testified to his research into dynamism, movement, and light effects. In 1914 Elica was born, its name representing a tribute to Marinetti's motto, and in 1915, together with Fortunato Depero, he subscribed to the manifesto Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe. During the years of the First World War, which Balla firmly supported, he pursued the idea of total art, defined as Futurist Art-action. In 1918 he published the Manifesto of Color, a profound analysis of the role of color in avant-garde painting. Totally converted to Futurism, he sold all his figurative works at auction and began signing subsequent works with the pseudonym FuturBalla. After the death of Umberto Boccioni in 1916, Balla became the undisputed protagonist of the Futurist movement, a role he maintained in subsequent years. In 1925 he dedicated to Boccioni the work The Fist of Boccioni. In 1920 he joined the editorial board of the journal Roma Futurista and decorated the celebrated cabaret Bal Tic Tac, a fashionable Roman venue during the 1920s. In 1926 he created a sculpture of Mussolini, drawing closer to Fascism and being celebrated as an official artist of the regime. With the Manifesto of Futurist Aeropainting in 1929, he made his final formal act of adherence to Futurism. However, around the 1930s, Balla began to distance himself from the movement, no longer fully sharing Futurist poetics and simultaneously distancing himself from Fascism. In this phase he returned to figuration with paintings such as Primo Carnera (1933), which, while drawing on traditional painting techniques, depicted contemporary subjects. Balla's stylistic evolution took him from early Divisionism, through Futurism and the search for dynamism, to a reinterpretation of traditional figuration. In 1949 some of his works, including the celebrated Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash from 1912, were exhibited at the MoMA in New York in the exhibition Twentieth-Century Italian Art. The works of Giacomo Balla are today preserved in important international institutions, including the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome, the Gallery of Modern Art in Turin, the Guggenheim in Venice, and the MoMA in New York, testimony to his historical and artistic significance in the panorama of European modern art.