Word: balla
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Futurism made the most noise at the start. The futurist painters' manifestos of 1910, written by that inspired poet and arch-hypester Filippo T. Marinetti and signed by a clutch of brilliantly gifted artists (Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carra, Luigi Russolo and Gino Severini), declared war on cultural history -- "the enthusiasm for everything worm-eaten, rotting with filth, eaten away by time...
...response to the general mobilization of the French army, painted in Paris -- seems, with its antique gun limber and biplane wings, almost as nostalgic an image as a battle piece by Paolo Uccello. But others have not dated. In particular, the spiking and whorling of translucent mechanical forms in Balla's Abstract Speed, 1913, can be seen as one of the great pictorial images of our century, as fresh in impact as the day it was painted...
...Balla was the best painter associated with Futurism, the idea of metaphysical painting is all but synonymous with De Chirico. Just as futurist cells sprang up all over the world, and futurism was for most people synonymous with modern art up to at least 1925, so De Chirico's dreaming, spatially deceitful piazzas and arcades, with their phallic locomotives and long-shadowed statues, had an immense resonance both inside and outside Italy. Their influence on surrealism was crucial, but their reveries about past and present, nature and culture, memory and desire also hover behind much Italian art from...
...rather claustral kind, but atmosphere just the same -- bathe the bodies and unify them as objects in the world while threatening always to dissolve them as emblems of personality. The surfaces look as if they came via Philip Guston from Monet, picking up some of Giacomo Balla's futurist dissections of light particles along the way -- a sober flicker in which images flash and are gone like the sides of fish in dark, weedy water...
...scrutiny of a single object from multiple viewpoints: the table stood still, the eye moved. In futurism, the eye is fixed and the object moves, but it is still the basic vocabulary of cubism -- fragmented and overlapping planes -- that tells us so. Carra, Boccioni and, above all, Balla prized the photographs of sequential movement taken by Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne Jules Marey. Some of Balla's own paintings, like the famous Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, 1912, are virtually straight renderings of multiple-exposure photographs. But in his series of paintings inspired by a Fiat speeding down...