A note on images
For reasons of copyright, I have not reproduced most of the works discussed in the text. Instead, each article is followed by a short gallery of selected works, with links to museum, collection or institutional pages where images can be viewed. Other works mentioned in the essay may also be found online, but I have limited these suggestions to sources that seem reliable, stable and clearly identified.
Late figuration and the modern image
Balla’s late figuration is not a simple return to realism after Futurism. Nor, however, does every late portrait, domestic scene or landscape need to be read as a disguised Futurist experiment. Many of these works return quite openly to recognisable figures, likenesses, interiors, landscapes and topical subjects. Their interest lies in the fact that this return takes place after Divisionism, photography, Futurist dynamism, theatre, design and the applied arts. Reality returns, but not always in the same register. Sometimes it returns as portraiture, memory or domestic life; sometimes as an image already photographed, printed, posed, publicised and lit.
Benzi’s account of the last Balla begins from a necessary correction. The artist’s return to figuration has too often been treated as a retreat: a conservative fall from the avant-garde into belated realism. Benzi resists that assumption. To move away from an earlier modernist language is not necessarily to become irrelevant, and Balla’s late work should not be judged as though any return to the visible world were already a form of failure. Other European artists, including Dix, Picabia and Malevich, changed direction radically without their later work being dismissed in quite the same way. Balla’s case is more difficult partly because Futurism had defined itself through movement, rupture and renewal. Yet for that very reason, the mere repetition of speed-lines, vortices and Compenetrazioni could itself have become a contradiction.
The late figuration is therefore not easily described as a conventional ritorno all’ordine. Nor is it simply a revival of Balla’s own pre-Futurist realism, or an alignment with one of the recognised European styles of the interwar years. It is more eccentric and more unstable than that. What Benzi sees in these works is a renewed search for modernity after the first language of Futurism had itself become historical. Balla returns to recognisable images, but not as if Futurism had never happened. He returns to the visible world after photography, speed, theatre, design and the applied arts had altered his sense of what an image could be.
The first late figurative experiments are not lapses. Benzi places particular importance on Nel patio of 1926 and Autocaffè of 1928. In these works, Balla begins to formulate a new kind of figuration inspired not by academic realism but by photography, cinema and the visual language of illustrated magazines. Autocaffè is especially revealing because it is realistic, photographic and self-reflexive, yet it still circulated within a Futurist context. Benzi stresses that until around 1933 Balla appears to alternate between Futurism and figuration, and that this alternation must have been, at least for a while, acceptable within the movement. The realistic image was not immediately outside Futurism; it could be presented as a possible renewal of it.
Balla’s 1930 text signed “Futurballa” is crucial. In it, he argues that cinema, as “living painting”, has overtaken painters because it attracts crowds and represents contemporary life with far greater immediacy. The conclusion is not that painting should retreat into the past. It is that painting must answer the challenge of cinema and modern image culture. Balla calls for a new “cine-photo-mechanical” sensibility able to study contemporary reality truthfully. This gives a theoretical basis for the late works: the modern image is no longer found primarily in the heroic Futurist iconography of speed, but in cinema, fashion photography, publicity, photo-reportage and the mass circulation of images.
By the 1930s, the photographic eye had changed meaning again. In the early Divisionist and verist period, photography had meant direct observation, enlargement, cropping, tonal construction and a coolly objective relation to reality. In the Futurist period, photography and chronophotography had helped Balla analyse movement. In the late works, photography becomes the distilled image of modern taste: fashion photography, cinema publicity, theatrical portraiture, news images, rotogravure, magazine reproduction and the glamorous pose. Benzi’s point is that these images were more modern, in everyday terms, than elite avant-garde photographic experiments such as rayograms or Bauhaus photography, because they had entered the shared imagination of millions of viewers.
This is why Benzi’s references to Arturo Ghergo and Elio Luxardo are important. Their diagonal cuts, raking light, dramatic contrasts and glamorous poses offered Balla a visual language that was not simply descriptive. It was already iconic. These photographers were making images for cinema, fashion, publicity and celebrity culture, and Balla saw in that world a new form of modern visibility. His late figures often refer not only to individual people but to types of image already circulating in public visual culture: the boxer, the star, the modern woman, the fashion model, the photographed celebrity, the news event, the posed family scene.
The comparison with Pop Art requires care, but it is not casual. Benzi does not mean that Balla in the 1930s is already Pop in the American 1960s sense. Italy in the 1930s did not yet have the same consumer saturation or aggressive commercial image-world that later shaped Warhol, Lichtenstein or Rosenquist. The point is more precise: Balla understands that a modern popular image can become powerful because it has already been consecrated by mass communication. A photograph reproduced in a newspaper, a fashion image, a cinema still, or a publicity portrait has an authority different from an image painted directly from life. It already belongs to collective visual memory.
A technical device reinforces this reading. In several major paintings of the 1930s, including Primo Carnera campione del mondo, Le quattro stagioni in rosso and Andiamo che è tardi, Balla uses a veil of tulle or a mesh-like support to create a reticulated surface. Benzi treats this as a deliberate engagement with the texture of mass reproduction. The surface evokes the halftone screen of printed newspaper or magazine images. The device does more than decorate the surface. It suggests that Balla is not just copying photographs; he is imitating the texture through which mass-media photographs reached the public.
Primo Carnera campione del mondo of 1933 is the clearest example. The image is based on a widely circulated photograph of the boxer Primo Carnera published on the front page of La Gazzetta dello Sport when he became world champion. The Palazzo Merulana / Imaginaria material identifies the photograph as by Elio Luxardo and stresses that the image was disseminated internationally. Balla’s painting is therefore not simply a portrait of Carnera. It is a painted version of a public image, an image already transformed by sport, journalism, celebrity and national projection. The boxer becomes a modern icon because the press has already made him one.
The material structure of Primo Carnera deepens the point. The work is painted on the reverse of Vaprofumo of 1926, a shaped Futurist work connected with scent, synaesthesia and the playful Futurism of the late 1920s. On the other side, Balla paints a photographic celebrity image from 1933. The two-sided support makes the transition physical: Futurist synaesthetic abstraction on one face, mass-media figuration on the other. The painting’s metal mesh or reticulated support creates the effect of printed reproduction. The boxer is not painted as if seen directly in the studio; he is painted as if already mediated by the press.
La figlia del sole of 1933 belongs to the same world. The figure, the pose and the address to the viewer align Balla with fashion photography, cinema publicity and illustrated magazines. The painting is not a return to nineteenth-century portraiture. Its visual sources are modern: glamour lighting, photographic pose, posed identity, fashion and celebrity. The body is presented not only as a person but as an image of modern desirability.
La bionbruna of around 1926 is an earlier step in the same direction. Biasini Selvaggi identifies the subject as Valentina Alatri, through Elica’s testimony, and reads the painting as an image of a modern woman who can shift both hair colour and identity, from brunette to blonde. The work evokes the cinema “vamp”, while the triple string of pearls, cigarette smoke and electric light rays form a diagonal construction still carrying a trace of Futurist dynamism. The painting is not simply a stylish portrait. It shows Balla transferring Futurist diagonals and light-effects into the language of fashion, cinema and constructed feminine identity.
Works such as Colorluce, Parlano and related paintings of 1933–34 carry this question forward. In Parlano, Benzi notes the impression of a scene from a telefoni bianchi film, the polished Italian cinema of the 1930s whose elegant interiors, fashionable clothes and modern props suggested a stylish bourgeois world. The daughters, Futurist clothing, studio setting and conversational arrangement belong to this modern cinematic atmosphere rather than to a traditional family portrait. Elica recalled that the painting belonged to the first group of post-Futurist figurative works and that something Futurist remained in the background. The observation is useful because it prevents a clean separation between Futurist and figurative Balla. The new figuration often stages Futurism as memory, décor, clothing, studio environment or visual residue.
Balla’s public break with Futurism in 1937 is best understood as a late declaration rather than a precise starting point. In the letter published in Perseo on 1 February 1937, he declares himself distant from Futurist events and attacks opportunistic or commercially minded figures. He affirms his belief in “absolute realism”, without which art falls into ornamental decoration, and says that he has returned to his earlier art: the interpretation of “bare, healthy reality”, renewed through the spontaneous sensibility of the artist. The language is strong, but the change had been underway for some time. Benzi places the deeper shift in the earlier 1930s, after the period when Balla had been alternating between Futurist and figurative work.
Biasini Selvaggi also qualifies the 1937 break. Apart from decorative work undertaken for financial reasons, he places Balla’s rupture with Futurism in the first half of the 1930s, while also noting signs of figuration before then. Autocaffè of 1928 is cited by Balla himself as evidence of the new direction, and Valle Giulia of 1920 already anticipates elements of the later turn through its marked contours, defined forms and passages of light. This is both a chronological and visual point: Balla had already been moving towards a more defined, iconic figuration before he publicly announced the break.
The phrase “absolute realism” is not simple either. It might sound like a rejection of modernity, but Benzi and Biasini Selvaggi both complicate that reading. Balla does not return to academic naturalism. His late realism is a realism after photography, cinema, fashion, publicity, Futurist design and mass image circulation. It also continues his old concern with light. Biasini Selvaggi describes the late work as part of a piano sequenza in which figuration and abstraction, nature and artifice, spirit and matter, vision and view, near and far are repeatedly brought into relation. The late Balla is not a painter who forgets abstraction; he repurposes the lessons of abstraction inside a new figurative image-world.
The move to Via Oslavia in 1929 is important for the late work. This apartment, at Via Oslavia 39B in the Della Vittoria district of Rome, is the later Casa Balla. The family moved there in June 1929, into what Elica called an “impiegatizio” apartment, and Balla lived and worked there with Elisa, Luce and Elica until his death in 1958. MAXXI describes Casa Balla as a laboratory of experimentation created by Balla with his daughters, where functionality and aesthetics coexist, and where the apartment becomes an artwork. The rooms were transformed into a total environment of objects, furniture, colours, painted surfaces and domestic inventions. This apartment belongs fully to the later story because the late figurative works are not produced in neutral studio space. They emerge from a home already saturated with Futurist memory, colour, object-making and family collaboration.
The light of Via Oslavia is also significant. Biasini Selvaggi records Elica’s memory that the rooms lacked the softened light of earlier homes such as Valle Giulia and Via Paisiello. The morning light was too strong, and in the afternoon the light returned as a hard reflection from the houses opposite. This helps explain the severity or roughness of some late portraits and interiors. It should not be dismissed as simple coarsening of style. Balla is responding to a harsher and more frontal light. The late works are part of a continuing search for a changing vision of truth, not a decline into careless realism.
Merjian’s argument about Balla’s “domestication of transcendence” provides context, even if the main emphasis of this section is late painting. Balla had already spent years bringing Futurist energy into chairs, screens, lampshades, clothing, furniture, interiors, fashion and domestic objects. His Futurism did not only explode outwards into speed and the city; it also moved inwards into the home. Merjian’s point that Balla’s true arena is often the bourgeois salon helps explain why the late image-world is so often domestic, fashioned, posed or interior. The modern image does not only belong to the street, the machine or the crowd. In Balla it also belongs to the studio-house, the family, the chair, the dress, the framed pose, the magazine and the room.
The Biagiotti-Cigna collection is important for the reception of this late Balla. MART notes that Laura Biagiotti was among the first to recognise the value of Balla’s 1930s figurative works, which had long been undervalued. This deserves mention because the late works were not simply forgotten by accident. Their status was affected by an art-historical narrative that privileged the heroic Futurist period and looked suspiciously at figurative painting after the avant-garde. The Biagiotti-Cigna collection, and later exhibitions such as Giacomo Balla. Dal futurismo astratto al futurismo iconico, helped make it possible to see the 1930s works as part of Balla’s continuing modernity.
Marcia su Roma, begun in the early 1930s and completed by the mid-1930s, is one of the most difficult and revealing late works. Balla paints it on the reverse of the large Velocità astratta of 1913, almost concealing one of the major works of his Futurist period. Benzi treats this as a powerful symbolic act: Balla turns the page on earlier Futurism by painting a huge historical-political image on the back of a Futurist achievement. The act is not only practical reuse. It is a material reversal of priorities.
The subject of Marcia su Roma must be handled directly. Balla translates the founding episode of Fascism into a large painted image derived from the forms in which the event circulated through newspapers and contemporary chronicles. Rather than an academic history picture, it is a painted version of a mass-circulated political image. This is why Benzi compares it to the later mythology of contemporary media images. The comparison is not meant to make the work benign. It means that Balla understands political history as something already mediated by the press.
The failure of Marcia su Roma is also significant. Benzi notes that it was exhibited only once, in 1935, remained in Balla’s possession, and did not attract the public acquisition that its scale and subject might have suggested. The reasons may have been both aesthetic and political. The Fascist regime preferred other forms of myth-making, especially the monumental mural language associated with Sironi. Balla’s image may have been too advanced, too journalistic, too media-conscious, or simply not useful to the regime’s preferred visual rhetoric. It is therefore not enough to say that the painting has Fascist subject matter. The more interesting point is the mismatch between its political theme and its visual language: it belongs to Fascist modernity, but not easily to Fascist public imagery.
The late “red” works continue the mixture of modern image, domestic subject and colour experiment. Le quattro stagioni in rosso, painted between 1939 and 1940, use Giuliana Canuzzi, the young daughter of the colonel living below Balla, as protagonist. Un’onda di luce of 1943 shows Elica wrapped in brilliant reds close to cinnabar. Biasini Selvaggi connects Balla’s red with several layers of meaning: the colour of Boccioni’s fist, of Futurist letter-paper, of early twentieth-century spectacle, and of vitality and energy. In these works, red is not simply decorative intensity. It becomes a concentrated field of memory, Futurist residue, emotional heat and visual theatre.
The reticulated support reappears in other late works, including Luce estiva, Profilo controluce and the red cycle. In these cases the device no longer belongs only to the explicitly public image of Primo Carnera. It also enters portraiture and domestic figuration, where the image can look directly figurative from a distance while behaving, at the surface, like something filtered through a screen, veil or reproductive texture. Benzi’s catalogue text records several works painted on metal mesh attached to panel. The significance does not lie merely in technical novelty. Balla’s late painting can be recognisable and figurative while still carrying the surface logic of a mediated modern image.
La fila per l’agnello of 1942 gives the late photographic eye a very different subject. The work shows a queue of people waiting for food during wartime rationing, seen from the Via Oslavia building, looking towards Via Montello. The Parma exhibition notice identifies the work by its inscription on the back as La fila per l’agnello (detto a Roma abbacchio), painted in the winter of 1942. The composition is vertical and window-based, almost a photographic slice of street life. The sky is not the subject; the scene is seen through a specific vantage point. The work brings Balla’s early concern with urban observation and photographic framing into the conditions of wartime scarcity.
The significance of La fila per l’agnello lies in the combination of window, queue and light. It is not a social-realist crowd scene in the usual sense. It is a subjective view from above, framed by the artist’s domestic position, in which public hardship is observed through the apparatus of the window. The queue belongs to wartime Rome, but the image also belongs to Balla’s lifelong habit of turning everyday urban facts into formally precise visual events. The light remains the thread: even in a scene of scarcity, the image is structured by luminous perception.
Noi 4 allo specchio of 1945 is one of Balla’s last major statements of family, photography and colour. Meurer and Merucci treat it as a late reprise of his interest in colour and light. The apparently spontaneous framing captures a moment of family and professional life almost like a colour still. Balla appears with his daughters Elica and Luce, while Elisa is in the background reading the newspaper. The painting reprises a photograph of the same year showing the family in the studio-house in Via Oslavia, perhaps taken during the painting sessions. The back identifies the subject and date, including “La famiglia del pittore” and “Roma / ottobre 1945”. The artist represents himself holding numerous brushes, a sign of his concern not to mix colours and to preserve chromatic purity.
This late mirror image folds the whole career back on itself. It recalls the early Nello specchio of 1902, with its daguerreotype-like tonality and group reflection, but now the setting is Via Oslavia, after Futurism, after the total house, after the return to figuration, and after the war. The image is traditional in appearance, yet its framing, photographic origin, colour-consciousness and self-presentation as painter at work keep it tied to Balla’s modern visual habits. The family is not only represented; it is staged as an image of painting, memory and studio life.
Non mi lasciare of 1947, representing Elisa near the end of her life, shows another aspect of late photography and painting. Biasini Selvaggi reads it as a work in which the mechanical nature of photographic reproduction is contradicted by the emotional and material force of paint. The point is not simply that Balla uses photography and then makes it emotional. Rather, the late painting stages a tension between the photographic image as record and the painted image as an act of attachment. The title itself pulls the picture into the sphere of conjugal memory, age, dependence and loss.
The late landscapes and city views extend the same concerns into another register. Works such as I ruscelli di Borghetto of 1938, Monte Mario, La città che avanza of 1947, Valle Giulia of 1945 and Villa Borghese of 1948 are used by Biasini Selvaggi to show Balla’s continued commitment to vision, light and unexpected framing. These are not a return to nineteenth-century landscape painting. They are late attempts to hold onto the objectivity of vision after a lifetime of photographic, Futurist and chromatic experiment. The city and landscape reappear as modern images, not as untouched nature.
The postwar rediscovery of Balla’s Futurism complicates the last years. After the Second World War, his house became a destination for avant-garde artists, collectors and foreign museum curators. His abstract works, especially the Compenetrazioni iridescenti, came back into view and influenced younger postwar artists. Balla responded by making updated versions of earlier abstract inventions. Benzi argues that these were not simple replicas. They were reworked through a different expressive range and through a new awareness of postwar abstraction, as if Balla wished to reaffirm his central role in the origins of European abstraction.
This late return to abstraction does not collapse into the late figurative works, but the two belong to the same final self-positioning. Balla is both the ageing realist of Via Oslavia and the rediscovered precursor of abstraction. He paints family, wartime queues, landscapes and portraits, but he also revisits the Compenetrazioni. The result is not a neat sequence but a layered old age: domestic memory, public image, late realism, revived abstraction, ill health and a protective family environment.
The Galleria Nazionale’s holdings help to make this long arc visible. The donation by Elica and Luce in the 1980s, followed by later additions from Luce’s estate, included early works such as La pazza and Affetti, Futurist works including Compenetrazioni iridescenti, studies of speed and interventionist demonstrations, paintings of spiritualist inspiration from the 1920s, and the late figurative production that was still little studied. The museum itself therefore became a place where Balla’s continuity could be reconsidered: from Divisionist photography and social realism, through Futurist dynamism, to applied art, spiritualism and the long season of personal realism.
The late drawings of 1956, made when Balla was elderly, suffering from cataracts and rarely leaving home, are a final act of vision and memory. Biasini Selvaggi describes drawings from the Campagna romana group, made on invitation cards for the wedding of Adolfo Cosmelli and Donatella Balestra dei marchesi di Mottola. By this stage the act of seeing is fragile, but Balla still selects the most clearly lit object and searches memory through images, sounds and smells of the land. The last phase returns to light not as Futurist force or optical analysis, but as recollection.
The late Balla is therefore not a fallen Futurist, nor simply a realist who resumes the art of his youth. He is an artist who re-enters the visible world after modernity has changed the forms in which that world appears. The late figuration absorbs cinema, photography, fashion, celebrity, publicity, wartime observation, domestic space and memory. The modern image is the key: Balla’s figures and landscapes are modern not because they look abstract, but because they pass through the visual habits of the twentieth century.
[Producing these essays requires care, time, research, and resources. Contributions to help sustain this exploration would be greatly appreciated.]
https://donorbox.org/inner-surfaces-resonances-in-art-and-literature-837503
Gallery of selected works
Giacomo Balla, Google Arts & Culture
A broad Google Arts & Culture page gathering works, stories and related image resources for Giacomo Balla.
Giacomo Balla, Mart / Google Arts & Culture
An online exhibition from Mart, with images of Balla’s Divisionist, Futurist and applied work, including material related to movement, light, theatre, furniture and domestic objects.
Casa Balla, Via Oslavia 39B, Rome
The Futurist apartment created by Giacomo Balla with Luce and Elica Balla
Page title: “Casa Balla, Via Oslavia”
Source: MAXXI booklet
Link: https://www.maxxi.art/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Casa_Balla_casa-artista_booklet-1.pdf
Giacomo Balla, Velocità astratta, 1913; reverse: Marcia su Roma, 1931–33
Oil on canvas
Pinacoteca Agnelli, Turin
Page title: “Velocità astratta, 1913”
Source: Pinacoteca Agnelli
Link: https://www.pinacoteca-agnelli.it/collezione/velocita-astratta/
Giacomo Balla, La fila per l’agnello, 1942
Oil on panel
Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome
Page title: “Un’onda di luce. Giacomo Balla a Roma”
Source: Artribune
Link: https://www.artribune.com/arti-visive/arte-moderna/2017/03/mostra-giacomo-balla-galleria-nazionale-roma/
Giacomo Balla, Un’onda di luce, 1943
Painting
Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome
Page title: “Un’onda di luce – Giacomo Balla”
Source: Google Arts & Culture / La Galleria Nazionale
Link: https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/un-onda-di-luce-giacomo-balla/ZQGp2dAL1ryCFQ
Readers may also wish to consult the Mart exhibition page “Giacomo Balla. The Style of the Avant-Garde. Works from the Biagiotti Cigna Collections”, from the Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, which presents works from the Laura Biagiotti and Fondazione Biagiotti Cigna collections.
Link: https://www.mart.tn.it/en/balla
Inner Surfaces 