Lot 42
  • 42

Giacomo Balla

Estimate
3,500,000 - 4,500,000 USD
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Description

  • Giacomo Balla
  • Velocità d'automobile + luci
  • Signed Balla (lower left)
  • Oil on gold paper laid down on board
  • 19 by 26 3/4 in.
  • 48.3 by 68 cm

Provenance

Rose Fried Gallery, New York (acquired from the artist in 1953)

Acquired from the above in 1953 and thence by descent

Exhibited

New York, Rose Fried Gallery, The Futurists: Balla, Severini 1912-1918, 1954, no. 4

New York, Sidney Janis Gallery, Balla, Boccioni, Carrá, Russolo, Severini, 1954, no. 3

Rome, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Arte Italiana del XX secolo da collezioni americane, 1960, no. 12

New York, The Museum of Modern Art; The Detroit Institute of Arts; Los Angeles County Museum, Futurism, 1961-62

Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, The Morton G. Neumann Family Collection, 1980, no. 12 (catalogued as oil on canvas)

Milan, Palazzo Grassi, Futurismo & Futurismi, 1986

Literature

Maria Drudi Gambillo and Teresa Fiori, Archivi del Futurismo, vol. II, Rome, 1962, no. 67, illustrated p. 82

Giovanni Lista, Giacomo Balla, Modena, 1982, no. 306, illustrated p. 193

 

Catalogue Note

Velocità d’automobile + luci belongs to a seminal group of works that Balla executed in 1913-14 on the theme of cars in movement, exploring the ultimate concepts of Futurism: dynamism, speed and light (see figs. 1 and 2).  As early as 1910 Balla produced several studies of cars, some stationary and some in movement.  However, it was not until he saw the ‘photodynamics’ by the Bragaglia brothers in 1912 that his research on this theme entered into a new phase, resulting in a radical change of style, and ultimately in a number of works that are now regarded as icons of Futurist art.

In developing his own version of Divisionism and abstraction, Balla was initially influenced by Etienne-Jules Marey’s Chronophotography, a technique of capturing sequences of movement within a single frame.  The main effect that Chronophotography had on painting was the dematerialisation of form, breaking up the image in a way that enables the artist to translate the visual effect of movement into a pictorial language.  Balla’s experimentations with this new technique resulted in the masterpiece Bambina che corre sul balcone of 1912 (G. Lista, op. cit., no. 290), in which the form of the girl is multiplied to record her progression in time and space.  In portraying different sequences within a single picture frame, the artist destroys the naturalist connotation of space and the corporeality of matter.  In his experimentation along this road, and moving increasingly towards abstraction, Balla ultimately arrived at his concept of linea di velocità or line of speed, the basic formal element in his dynamic abstractions of movement.

 

Fascinated with the pace of modern life and excited by new technology, Balla found their perfect embodiment in the image of a speeding automobile.  According to his daughters’ testimony, the artist would go out and install himself on the corner of Via Veneto in Rome, studying the passing of motor cars.  Writing about this series of works, Giovanni Lista commented: “For whole afternoons Balla filled the pages of his notebooks, annotating the complex effect which the fast passing of motor cars produces: the shadows in movement; the fleeting reflection of the colours in the shopwindows; the forms of propagation of the noise; the alterations which seem to be produced in the structure itself of the space crossed by a body in movement.  It is from these studies that the masterpieces of abstract art derive, which the artist realised transposing the theme of motor cars in motion” (Giovanni Lista, op. cit., p. 49).

 

The present work reflects Balla’s transition from his kinetic, analytical phase, towards the concept of the line of speed, in which he abandoned any kind of figurative representation of the moving object, and reduced light and speed to simple graphic symbols.  In Velocità d’automobile + luci the image of the automobile is highly stylized, and the sensation of energy and movement is created by the whirling lines epitomizing its dizzying speed, as well as the bright flashes of light reflected on its surface as the car passes.  Balla’s focus has shifted from the moving object to the essence of movement itself, and the dynamic sensation of speed has become an autonomous entity and the main subject of the work.  With its vortex of pure, abstract lines, Velocità d’automobile + luci presents the high point of Balla’s art, and demonstrates the virtuosity with which he achieved the Futurist ideal.

Balla kept this work in his studio for forty years before he sold it to the New York dealer Rose Fried in 1953.  On his shipping instructions and invoices to Fried, he listed this picture as Velocità d'automobile + luci, oil on paper, and dated it 1913.    Fried later included the picture in an exhibition at her gallery in 1954 and it was sold to the present owner around this time.   In a review of that exhibition, William Rubin gave the following visual analysis of the present work:  "In Balla's Automobile Velocity and Light a luminous grid of browns on a gold paper ground is crossed by cussessive waves of mixed yellow and brown resulting in a rich tension between vertical and curved elements" (William Rubin, "Futurism:  Paintings and Polemic," New York,"  Art News, New York, February 1, 1954, p. 13). 

 

 

 

Fig. 1 Giacomo Balla, Automobile in corsa, 1913-14, oil on card, Private Collection

Fig. 2 Giacomo Balla, Espansione dinamica + velocità, 1913, oil on card, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome