IN ARTE EST LIBERTAS

GIACOMO BALLA
Turin 1871
Rom 1958



BIOGRAPHY


Italian painter, sculptor, stage designer and designer Giacomo Balla was born in Turin in 1871. The autodidact first painted landscapes based on nature and portraits. Short, irregular brush strokes and agitated lighting already showed his closeness to Divisionism. In 1900 Bala spent nine months in Paris, where he discovered the existencial space of the metropolis on the light-flooded and crowded nightly boulevards. The impressions gathered in Paris later influenced his futuristic pictures, in which he used a chronophotographic analysis of movement taken from photography and artificial light as a means of expression. Marinetti's famous thesis on literary Futurism was published in 1909. In it Balla found his own ideas confirmed. In 1910 Balla wrote the 'Manifesto dei pittori futuristi' and the 'Manifesto tecnico della pittura futurista' together with U. Boccioni, C. Carrą, G. Severini and L. Russolo. Bala's first futuristic picture 'Dinamismo di un cane al guinzaglio' (1912) shows, how Bala analysed movement and expressed the various phases of movement by superimposing the individual abstracted shapes. From 1913 Giacomo Balla signed his pictures 'Futur Balla'. The chromatic dissection of light and the segmentation of moving objects and figures into geometrical shapes were taken to the limits of abstraction. Balla also worked in the area of applied art. He designed clothing and produced carpets, vases and lamps. He experimented with objects made of various materials such as cardbord, fabric, aluminium foil, mirrors and colored glass. With these 'complessi plastici' Balla became one of the co-founders of abstract sculpture. Around 1930 Balla gradually moved away from Futurism and in 1937 returned to traditional representational art and the veristic representation of themes from his youth. Giacomo Balla died in Rome in 1958.




The Art Nouveau
(the "new art")

was a widely influential but relatively short-lived movement that emerged in the final decade of the 19th century and was already beginning to decline a decade later. This movement - less a collective one than a disparate group of visual artists, designers and architects spread throughout Europe was aimed at creating styles of design more appropriate to the modern age, and it was characterized by organic, flowing lines- forms resembling the stems and blossoms of plants - as well as geometric forms such as squares and rectangles.
The advent of Art Nouveau can be traced to two distinct influences: the first was the introduction, around 1880, of the Arts and Crafts movement, led by the English designer William Morris. This movement, much like Art Nouveau, was a reaction against the cluttered designs and compositions of Victorian-era decorative art. The second was the current vogue for Japanese art, particularly wood-block prints, that swept up many European artists in the 1880s and 90s, including the likes of Gustav Klimt, Giacomo Balla , Emile Galle and James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Japanese wood-block prints contained floral and bulbous forms, and "whiplash" curves, all key elements of what would eventually become Art Nouveau.
It is difficult to pinpoint the first work(s) of art that officially launched Art Nouveau. Some argue that the patterned, flowing lines and floral backgrounds found in the paintings of Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin represent Art Nouveau's birth, or perhaps even the decorative lithographs of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, such as La Goule at the Moulin Rouge (1891). But most point to the origins in the decorative arts, and in particular to a book jacket by English architect and designer Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo for the 1883 volume Wren's City Churches. The design depicts serpentine stalks of flowers coalescing into one large, whiplashed stalk at the bottom of the page, clearly reminiscent of Japanese-style wood-block prints.
Although Art Nouveau has become the most commonly used name for the movement, its wide popularity throughout Western and Central Europe meant that it went by several different titles. The most well-known of these was Jugendstil (Youth Style), by which the styles was known in German-speaking countries. Meanwhile in Vienna - home to Gustav Klimt, Otto Wagner, Josef Hoffmann and the other founders of the Vienna Secession - it was known as Sezessionsstil (Secession Style). It was also known as Modernismo in Spain and stile Liberty in Italy (after Arthur Liberty's fabric shop in London, which helped popularize the style). It also went by some more derogatory names: Style Nouille (noodle style) in France, Paling Stijl (eel style) in Belgium, and Bandwurmstil (tapeworm style) in Germany, all of which made playful reference to Art Nouveau's tendency to employ sinuous and flowing lines.
Art Nouveau's ubiquity in the late 19th century must be explained in part by many artists' use of popular and easily reproduced forms such as graphic art. In Germany, Jugendstil artists like Peter Behrens and Hermann Obrist, among many others, had their work printed on book covers and exhibition catalogs, magazine advertisements and playbills. But this trend was by no means limited to Germany. The English illustrator Aubrey Beardsley, perhaps the most controversial Art Nouveau figure due to his combination of the erotic and macabre, created a number of posters in his brief career that employed graceful and rhythmic lines. Beardsley's highly decorative prints, such as The Peacock Skirt (1894), were both decadent and simple, and represent the most direct link we can identify between Art Nouveau and Japonisme.
Despite its popularity - both in terms of its geographical spread and its influence on the creation of so many media - Art Nouveau enjoyed very few moments during its heyday when all artistic elements came together to be recognized as a coherent whole. One exception was the 1900 World's Fair in Paris (Exposition Universelle), where the Art Nouveau style was present in all its forms. Of particular note was the construction and opening of the Grand Palais in 1900, a building which, although in the Beaux Arts tradition, contained an interior glass dome that clearly adopted the Art Nouveau decorative style. Other exhibitions took place throughout the continent during this time, but none could claim to be celebrating Art Nouveau in such a comprehensive manner as had the Paris Expo.
If Art Nouveau quickly stormed Europe in the late 19th century, artists, designers and architects abandoned it just as quickly in the first decade of the 20th century. Although the movement had made the doctrine that "form should follow function" central to their ethos, some designers tended to be lavish in their use of decoration, and the style began to be criticized for being overly elaborate. In a sense, as the style matured, it started to revert to the very habits it had scorned, and a growing number of opponents began to charge that rather than renewing design, it had merely swapped the old for the superficially new.