Futurist Genius - Giacomo Balla

Futurist Genius - Giacomo Balla -
1925 - Oil on arras canvas, 279 × 381 cm. Guidonia (Rome), Laura Biagiotti Collection. The monumental work Futurist Genius by Giacomo Balla is the largest work ever created by Balla and is
held both by critics and the artist himself to be the key work of
his presence at the 1925 Paris Exhibition: a presence that was
highly symbolic for the origin and development of Art Déco.
The work is one of several by Giacomo Balla in the collection
of the stylist Laura Biagiotti, who in 1996 set up together with
her family the Fondazione Biagiotti Cigna in memory of her
husband, Gianni Cigna, who died prematurely. The collection
stemmed from a great passion for art and includes more than
200 works by the artist, of which one of the main nuclei is the
studies by Balla for fashion and is the largest and most important
collection of applied Futurist art in existence; the entire
collection was presented in 1996 at the Pushkin Museum in
Moscow and in 1998 in Rome at the Chiostro del Bramante.
The Futurist Genius arras was shown at the Ara Pacis in Rome
in 2009.
The work was created by Balla for the Exposition Internationale
des Arts décoratifs modernes held in Paris in 1925, where it
was on show in the decorative arts pavilion together with other
works by him.
The Paris exhibition confirmed the wide and by now
far-reaching international spread of futurist ideas which, interpreting
the theories of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, had already
in the preceding decade brought about a revolution in the ideological
and artistic fields and expressed the movement that
opened the way to the international avant-garde movements.
The myth of speed and dynamism was linked in that epoch to
a new concept of art, which the futurists saw no longer as simple portrayal but as concrete action on the world, which translated
into a hymn to modernity, progress and machines and
incarnated the optimistic and progressive vision of the start of
the century. The arras was shown again at the Amatori e Cultori
exhibition in Rome in 1928, in a dominant position at the centre
of a wall in the large anthological room dedicated to the work
of Giacomo Balla, where the artist presented a selection of the
most important works of his career, starting from the divisionism
of the start of the century.
Based on the Italian colours (red, white and green), on a blue
and light blue ground, the “prismatic” composition is centred on
the schematic figure of a man with a star-shaped head, symbol
of Italy. From this abstract figure which is only vaguely anthropomorphic
(the Futurist Genius, basically a self-portrait of Balla)
are rays of shapes and noise that condense the various Futurist
pictorial experiences of the artist in a kind of artistic summa: from
the acute “motorumorist” shapes to the abstract volumes of Feu
d’Artifice (1916-1917), from the patriotic colours of Forme-grido
Viva l’Italia (1915) to the theoretical and theosophical representations
on the “fourth dimensional” of Trasformazioni forme-spiriti
(1918) and of Pessimismo contro Ottimismo (1923), to the intersecting
triangles of Compenetrazioni iridescenti (1912-13).
The Futurist genius arras is a precise and resumptive representation
of a genial process that leads the artist to an awareness
of the dynamic relations of the universe, and to their representation
as pure shapes and colours: avant-garde not just in
shapes, but also and above all in intellectual intuitions, dimensions
that go beyond the visible and give form to the invisible,
as Balla himself said in the Manifesto della Ricostruzione Futurista
dell’Universo (1915).”
Prof. Fabio Benzi
Ordinary professor of Contemporary Art History at the University
of Chieti and Scientific Curator of the Biagiotti Cigna Foundation