Word: balla
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...around 1925. The movement took an aggressively internationalist stance, looking to a future world unified by technology. Yet its rhetoric was bedded deep in Italian life. The core of the futurist group, which coalesced in the early 1900s, was made up of the painters Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carra, Giacomo Balla, Luigi Russolo and Gino Severini, the architect Antonio Sant'Elia and a few writers clustered around the figure of Marinetti, poet, dandy, ringmaster, publicist and red-hot explainer to the global village -- "the caffeine of Europe," as he called himself. They were all Italian; to be Italian then...
...only avant-garde movement in our century that can be shown to have had some formative effect on politics, and even that is debatable, acted on the right, not on the left. It was futurism, whose ideas and rhetoric (rather than the works of art actually painted by Balla, Severini or Boccioni) bodied forth some of the mythology of Italian Fascism. The futurist ethos expressed by Marinetti before World War I, with its cult of speed, male potency, antifeminism and violent struggle, supplied the oratorical framework for Mussolini's rise to power and set the stage for his appearance...