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Permanent Collection Back
Giacomo Balla
Italian painter Giacomo Balla was one of the founders of Futurism, signing the Futurist Manifesto, which was published in 1910. In this document, Balla, along with artist Umberto Boccioni and Carlo Carra, outlined their primary objective to depict movement, which they saw as symbolic of their commitment to the dynamic forward thrust of the twentieth century.
Futurism celebrated the machine - the racing car was heralded as the triumph of the age - and early futurist paintings were concerned with capturing figures and objects in motion. In [his] Girl Running on the Balcony, Balla attempted to realize movement by showing the girl's funning legs in repeated sequence. Other paintings, such as Dog on a Leash, got to grips with the problem of recreating speed and flight by superimposing several images on top of each other. Inevitably, the advances that were made by this short-lived movement were eventually to be overtaken by the art of cinematography. Futurism was finished by the First World War, after which Futurist ideals became increasingly associated with Fascism. Balla began to plough an independent path, at first toward abstraction and, after 1931, toward figuration. |
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