Word: balla
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...Balla called being drafted "a great honor" and said the experience was "overwhelming...
That art could be beautiful when dealing with neutral subjects, such as in the Mirror series, 1969-72. When he turned to high-art ones (his pastiches of Picasso, Cezanne, Balla, Matisse and so on), he could wittily run variations on art-history classics without mocking the seriousness of his sources. He brought them down a bit, without malice, just as he raised the comics a bit, without condescension. He looked vulgar 35 years ago; today you see his dandy's taste almost before you see the painting...
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...