Giacomo Balla

Giacomo Balla was born in Turin, Italy, on July 18th, 1871, and was an Italian painter, sculp­tor, set designer, and ​“free word” author. He was the only son of Giovanni and Lucia Gian­notti; as an adoles­cent, he showed inter­est in art and attended a three-year course at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Turin. In 1895 he left Turin to settle in Rome, where he remained for the rest of his life. He met Umberto Boccioni and Gino Severini in Rome in 1901 and painted some of his master­pieces, such as La Pazza. In 1915 he signed the mani­festo Futur­ist Recon­struc­tion of the Universe with Depero. In 1918 he published the Mani­festo of Color, and in January 1920, he joined the edito­r­ial staff of Roma Futur­ista. In the same year, he also deco­rated the Bal Tic Tac Cabaret, a Roman cabaret venue popular through­out the 1920s. In 1937 he wrote a letter to the news­pa­per Perseo in which he proclaimed his estrange­ment from ​“every Futur­ist event… in the belief that art is absolute realism”. From that moment on, he was side-lined by the offi­cial culture until the post-war reval­u­a­tion of his works and Futur­ist works in general.