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Milan continues with its path towards the 100th anniversary of Futurism, which will take place in 2009, by paying tribute to Giacomo Balla, one of its most brilliant representatives.
“This ambitious exhibition,” says Vittorio Sgarbi, the City of Milan’s Councillor for Culture, “is the first large exhibition associated with the celebrations for the 100th anniversary of the futurist movement, which coincides with the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Giacomo Balla.
But it is not just an occasion that has been determined by obligatory recurrences. It is the most complete retrospective of Balla’s artistic research up to the completion of his futuristic experience at the end of the 1920s. Giacomo Balla was already a mature artist when Futurism was born.
Works like Failure, A Portrait of Elisa, The Mad Woman and most of all The Staircase of Goodbyes, Street Light, Attachments and Trees and Hedge at Villa Borghese represent a varied and restless search, beyond the symbolism and curiosity of novelty and also through an original reflection on photography.
Balla was ready to adhere to futurism first as a forma mentis for a method of vision, for which he created a definitive codification, becoming, with the crisis that occurred during Boccioni’s later years, the Futurist painter par excellence.
“Futurballa”. Balla participated in the Futurist undertaking that began in April of 1910, at the request of Boccioni who met him in Rome after the Futurist evening that was held at the Mercandante Theatre of Naples. By compensating for the renunciation of Aroldo Bonzagni and Romolo Romani, Balla signed the technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting. His Street Light of 1909 is the futurist response to moonlight, aligning Balla with the debut of Futurism.”
It is a concurrence of sensibilities, as explained by Giovanni Lista, the exhibition’s curator, “A man like Balla could not fail to approve the idealistic program of Marinetti, a missionary of the future that aspires to be the final heir of the legends of the Risorgimento. But nothing demonstrates that Balla was already aware of the birth of futurism in 1909, when the movement was still guaranteed by positions that were limited most of all by literature and an ideological vision of history in terms of activist and revolutionary evolutionism.”
“Movement and light destroy the materiality of bodies”, wrote the five “founding fathers” of Futurism, one of whom was naturally Balla, and they seemed to prophetically foreshadow our world, where information travels and moves across luminous impulses. And so, Elica and Luce, were the names of Giacomo Balla’s two daughters, who were also painters. For more than fifty years, light and movement were the two obsessions that animated his work. This event is also the result of the collaboration of great international museums, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Tate Gallery in London, the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, the Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid and the Ktoller-Muller Museum in Otterlo, in addition of Italian museums, of course, such as the MART of Rovereto and the Art Gallery of Turin.

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