GIACOMO BALLA - Biography
Giacomo Balla (Turin, July 18, 1871 - Rome, March 1, 1958). He is among the first protagonists of Italian divisionism. He then became a prominent exponent of Futurism, signing together with Marinetti and the other futurists, the posters that sanctioned the theoretical aspects of the movement. He attended the Albertina Academy of Fine Arts where he met Pellizza da Volpedo. In the early twentieth century he began to paint Pointilliste paintings, without however strictly following the scientific program of Seurat and Signac. In 1895 he left Turin to settle in Rome, where he lived for a lifetime. In 1903, he met Umberto Boccioni, Gino Severini and Mario Sironi at the Free School of the Nude. A bond is born between him and Boccioni that will lead them to different paths of research on the futurist way. When Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published the first Futurist Manifesto in 1909, he joined the movement with Boccioni, Carrà and Russolo. In 1910 the Manifesto of the Futurist painters came out. On 11 April 1910, together with Boccioni, Carrà, Russolo and Severini, he signed the technical manifesto of futurist painting. In October 1918 he published the "Color Manifesto", where he analyzed the role of color in avant-garde painting. In 1937, however, he wrote a letter to the newspaper "Perseo" with which he declared himself extraneous to futurist activities. From that moment on he was set aside by the official culture, until the post-war revaluation of his works and of the futurist ones in general.
