Balla, Giacomo

Balla, Giacomo (1871–1958). Italian painter and designer, one of the leading Futurist artists. He was born in Turin and was mainly self-taught as an artist. In 1895 he moved to Rome, where he spent most of the rest of his life. He visited Paris in 1900–1 and brought back to Italy a feeling for colour and light that he passed on to Boccioni and Severini. His early works included landscapes and portraits, and after the turn of the century he became more interested in painting aspects of modern industrialized life. In 1910 he signed the two Futurist manifestos of painting, but he was initially cautious over his involvement with the movement and did not show his work in a Futurist group exhibition until 1913. By this time, however, he was becoming one of the most original and inventive of Futurist artists. His paintings showed a preoccupation with the characteristic Futurist aim of portraying motion, but unlike other members of the movement, Balla was not interested in machines and violence, his paintings tending rather towards the lyrical and the witty. The most famous is the delightful Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, 1912), in which the blurred multiple impressions of the dog's legs and tail convey movement in a manner that later became a cartoon convention. In 1913–16 Balla went beyond the principles of the Futurist manifesto, painting pictures that approach pure abstraction, having only the most residual resemblance to the observations in reality that inspired them (Abstract Speed—The Car Has Passed, Tate Gallery, London, 1913). After the First World War, most of the other leading Futurists abandoned the movement, but Balla stayed true to its ideals and became its leading figure. In 1929 he signed the manifesto of its offshoot movement Aeropittura, but from 1931 he reverted to a more traditional figurative style, ‘in the conviction that pure art is to be found in absolute realism, without which we fall into decorative, ornamental forms'. By the end of his long life he was revered as the last survivor of a brilliant phase of modern Italian art.