Word: ballas
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...change started with cubism and widely affected the European avantgarde. Its results range from the futurist sculpture of Italian artists like Umberto Boccioni and Giacomo Balla to the radical experiments of the Russian constructivists, Tatlin, Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Puni; from Alexander Archipenko's wall reliefs to Julio Gonzalez's iron constructions and Alexander Calder's fluttering mobiles. Artists as unlike as Naum Gabo and David Smith were affected by it. No sculptor interested in either ideal formal systems or new materials was immune to its promises, and its influence persists to this day. Sculpture had been solid since...