These untitled sketches (c. 1910s) are directly from Giacomo Balla’s notebook and done with pencil (verso with graphite, recto with colored pencil) on either side of a piece of notebook paper. The casualness of the materials and small scale makes them appear deceptively simple; yet their intricate geometric patterns are striking and complex. Balla utilizes pressure, shading, (and, on the recto, color), as well as both curved and straight lines to create dynamic compositions. Though their configurations seem random, the lines and shades of each sketch nonetheless come together in cohesive unity. The pencil marks are clean and confident, with no evidence of erasing, hesitation, or uncertainty. Giacomo Balla was an Italian painter whose work greatly influenced Futurist art. In the earlier part of his career, Balla was considered a Neo-impressionist. Despite its more traditional style and form, Neo-Impressionism was still comparatively abstract, relying on the viewer’s perspective to register the artist’s configuration of colored dots color on canvas as cohesive works of art. Balla’s engagement with a movement that rested on optical illusion was an early indicator of his interest in abstraction. Additionally, his earlier, Neo-Impressionist works -- such as “Street Light” (1909) -- “reflect contemporary French trends but also hint at his lifelong interest in rendering light and its effects.”1 As Balla honed his artistic style during a crucial point of the Industrial Revolution in Europe, the themes, objects, and even technique of his paintings became imbued with the mechanisms and movement of machinery. In 1909, he abandoned his Neo-Impressionist style in the wake of the Futurist movement, joining a group of artists, poets, and musicians to establish a new mode of art. Their provocative manifesto, penned by Filippo Marinetti, professed the movement's commitment to the principles of speed, movement, transience, and energy. For Balla, these concepts translated to painting in a way that rejects the static image, opting for a representation of movement, light, and sound divorced from the usual signifiers of the real world. Though his dynamic sketches and paintings are representational of material conditions, the transience of their forms renders his work completely abstract, existing purely as simulacra. Though prior works of Balla’s utilized this abstraction to depict motion, (such as “Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash”), it wasn’t until 1913 that sketches purely abstract in nature began to appear in his notebook. He first began by studying automobiles and experimented with overlapping, repeating, and “generating a vortical movement”2 with his lines in a way that mimicked the cyclical movement and chaos of not only a man made vehicle, but even the turbulent nature of movement itself.

I was first drawn to these sketches for their intricacy and intensity. As I first saw the verso, I was struck by how a pencil in a notebook could produce such a complex, bold, and intriguing sketch. The informality of a sketchbook made the object less intimidating than some of the other larger pieces on display, which only made its detail more remarkable. In fact, it is the nonchalance of the medium that perfectly encapsulates the aims of Balla and the Futurist movement in general. The artist’s sketchbook serves as a laboratory of ideas, a place in which one can experiment with images and study a subject. Like the lab journal or research notes of the scientist or scholar, Balla’s sketchbook tracks the progression of his thoughts, technique, and understanding of speed itself. Not only are these sketches of movement atemporal in form, but in their materialization; as Marinetti wrote, “Time and space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, for we have created velocity which is eternal and omnipresent.”3 Balla’s sketches are an exercise in divorcing time from reality, eliminating the intermediate stages between conception and actualization. Even the use of pencil provides a unique insight to the process of creation, indicating the pattern and movement of the hand of the artist. The context in which these sketches were created -- in a private notebook -- further embodies these principles. These experimental drawings were not intended to be displayed on their own, but rather inform later works. Sketches torn from a notebook such as these are not often exhibited in galleries or museums, and they are rarely regarded with the same reverence as works of greater scale, detail, and formality. Even their configuration, two drawings on different sides of the same page, are incompatible with conventional museum display. However, if we take Futurism seriously, the notebook is ultimately more important than the painting. Marinetti compared museums as cemeteries, saying that “to admire an old painting is the same as pouring our sensibility into a funerary urn, instead of casting it forward into the distance in violent spurts of creation and action.”4 The immediacy, sudden brilliance, and speed of Balla’s sketches is what truly embody the principles of Futurism, not their artfulness or intricacy. These studies of movement and speed demonstrate Balla’s aspiration to tackle an impossible challenge: how does one even begin to represent the real, yet intangible and give shape to the unrenderable? The futility and absurdity of such an aim gives way to a never ending artistic odyssey which places process before product. Ultimately, it is the pursuit -- not the outcome -- that is beautiful.

Notes:

[1] Encyclopedia Britannica. “Giacomo Balla: Italian Artist.” Accessed April 27, 2020. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Giacomo-Balla.

[2] Poggi, Christine. “Balla’s Vortex: The Volatile Politics of an Abstract Form.” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 71–72 (January 2019): 192–208. https://doi.org/10.1086/706096.

[3] Marinetti, F.T. “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism (1909).” In Futurism: An Anthology, edited by Rainey Lawrence, Poggi Christine, and Wittman Laura, 49-53. (Yale University Press, 2009), 51.

[4] Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism (1909)”, 52.