A leading member of the Futurist movement in Italy, Giacomo Balla received almost no formal artistic training. Following the death of his father when he was just nine, Balla served an apprenticeship in a lithography shop while taking drawing classes in the evenings. He also spent a few months at the Accademia Albertina in Turin where he showed early promise as a portraitist and produced paintings that that engaged with social issues.
In his late 30s, Balla developed an interest in the quasi-Divisionist style, which resulted in dramatic paintings such as Street Light (1909) and ignited the artist’s interest in the symbolism of light and Futurism, the art movement that sought to capture the dynamism and energy of the modern world.
In 1910, Balla began to take an active role in the group founded by Futurism theorist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. He was also one of the signatories of the Manifesto dei pittori futuristi (Manifesto of the Futurist Painters), a publication that expanded on the theories Marinetti had established a year earlier.
Balla first exhibited with the Futurists in 1912. The following year, he sold all of his early paintings at auction and devoted himself wholeheartedly to the new Futurist aesthetic, with a particular interest in the representation of speed and movement. He exhibited four paintings of speeding cars in Florence at the end of 1913 and at the Futurist exhibition in London the following year. To depict speed, Balla used lines of force, abstract rhythmic curves and contrasting colours, yielding dynamic, almost aggressively centrifugal compositions. In 1914, several of his paintings were reproduced in Umberto Boccioni’s seminal book Pittura, scultura futuriste (dinamismo plastico).
Balla’s paintings, with their emphasis on lines of ‘speed’ or ‘force’, continued to exemplify the Futurist ideal throughout the First World War and after. During the second wave of Futurism in the 1920s, Balla was one of the few first-generation Futurists to keep pace with his younger contemporaries, sharing their growing interest in geometric forms. By the early 1930s, however, Balla had reverted to portraying realism in landscape paintings and portraiture, even coming up with a series of introspective self-portraits.
This pastel drawing in EKCART Asia’s collection may be counted among Giacomo Balla’s abstract studies of velocity that occupied him from 1913 onwards – a period of intense creativity for the artist. The use of pastel was characteristic of Balla’s drawings throughout this fertile period. As publisher Piero Pacini noted, ‘Balla’s singular use of pastels [was] enriched by an array of dazzling, hazy, flashing light effects.’
Giacomo Balla’s works, including Street Light and canvases depicting speeding automobiles, are in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art in New York.
