Notebook

Notebook, 1993-

PEOPLE

Giacomo Balla


Italian painter; born in Turin, 1871; died in Rome, 1958. Self-taught, he went to Paris in 1900, discovering Impressionism and divisionism. It was the working world that inspired his early paintings, such as A Worker's Day, 1904. Severini and Boccioni were frequent visitors to his studio. In 1909, Marinetti won him over to the Futurists' theories: He then painted The Street Light, showing the decomposition of light, and in about 1910 he analyzed motion and reproduced the mechanics of walking in Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, 1912. He later developed extreme theories of Futurism and composed a series of canvases, one of which--Mercury Passes before the Sun, 1914--attained a degree of nonfiguration that made him a precursor of abstract painting. After the First World War, Balla continued to paint highly cadenced pictures, and in 1925 he participated in the "International Exhibition of Decorative Arts" in Paris, with two large tapestries: Sea, Sail, and Wind and The Futurist Spirit. After 1930 he returned to figurative painting . The Galeria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna in Rome did a major retrospective on him in 1972.

Rome: Galeria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna
New York: Museum of Modern Art

[p. 849]


[Ferrier, Jean-Louis, Director and Yann le Pichon, Walter D. Glanze [English Translation]. Art of Our Century, The Chronicle of Western Art, 1900 to the Present. New York: Prentice-Hall Editions. 1988.]









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