Giacomo Balla (1871-1958) has been singled out as the quintessentially abstract painter among all Futurists, and the forerunner of Italian modern art. This recognition began in the post-War years, when Balla’s fellow artists retraced the beginnings of abstraction to his historical avant-garde.
Balla’s distinct Futurist language unfolded as he gave form to works in various media, including drawings, pastels, temperas, oil on canvas, and even enamel on glass, illustrating the abstractions of speed. These compositions, unique in the panorama of the European avant-garde, were Balla’s interpretations of dynamism - his own imaginative translation of the words published in the Technical Manifesto of Futurism (1910) and stating that ‘the gesture we want to reproduce will no longer be a moment in the universal dynamism which has been stopped, but the dynamic sensation itself, perpetuated as such.’
No longer a literal illustration of the speed of racing cars and passers-by (as created by the experimental photographs of Étienne-Jules Marey and the Futurist Anton Giulio Bragaglia, that Balla had seen), these new abstractions consisted in lines running and twirling across space; imaginative, playful, orgasmic renderings of cosmic energy.
The present drawing is a prime example of Balla’s rejection of objective representation in favour of complete abstraction, a development that occurred around 1913. As Giovanni Lista, one of the foremost scholars of Futurism, recalls, ‘between 1913 and 1914, in the paintings on the speed of mechanical bodies, Balla elaborates compositions with linear rhythms, with accelerated diagonals, curves of varying radius, irregular trajectories and acute angles, arriving at translating the intensity of kinetic energy and the wholeness of its effects without resorting to the figuration of the object.’ (‘Al di là dello stile’, in Balla: La modernità futurista, Milan, 2008, pp. 263-264).
In the drawing Linea di velocità + vortice, movement is represented in its purest form, with several ‘lines of speed’ curving in arches across the sheet. The direction of movement, running from left to right, is suggested by the curves crossing from the bottom left corner, and by the pair of lines that curve upwards before descending in a straight line, similar to the trajectory of an object in which straight forward motion and falling are associated. The four looping vortices, another symbolic representation of kinetic motion that was prominent in Balla’s vocabulary at this time, travel horizontally across the bottom half of the sheet, gentle reducing in size and descending like the motion of a bouncing ball.
The forceful lines of the composition, almost all of which are curved, are rendered with a sharp and marked pencil stroke to which are juxtaposed lighter, more sketchy areas, almost like trails left by the object in passing. Also evident in this extraordinary futurist realisation is another trait characteristic of Balla's work and imagination: the binary oppositions of primary elements, represented in this case by the vigorous contrast between areas of heavy shading and bare paper.
