Paravento 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.