An authoritative monograph which explores the complete works of Giacomo Balla on the eve of celebrations for the Futurist centennial
For a long time, almost thirty years, there was deeply felt need for an in-depth monograph dealing with Giacomo Balla (1871- 1958), one of the greatest of artists of the Futurist movement and the European historical avant-garde. A master of abstractionism and a leading figure in the aesthetic upheaval that led contemporary art to abandon the traditional concept of the work of art and to propagate itself through all fields of the everyday life, he was the pioneer and inventor of that “Futurist reconstruction of the universe” that still underpins many developments in art today.
The monograph, by Fabio Benzi, a major scholar of Italian twentieth-century art, retraces the whole of Balla’s artistic career: from his Divisionist debut to the elaboration of his personal and innovative vision of Futurism, identifying his cultural roots by drawing on previously unpublished documents of fundamental importance, down to his post-Futurist figurative phase, which is also examined in its valence of modernity, closely bound up with the interpretation of the images of communication and the mass media