Giacomo Balla - Futurist Artist

The Futurists, as their name implies, wanted to focus on creating a unique and dynamic vision of the future with artists incorporating images of urban landscapes and modern machinery into their work including trains, cars and aeroplanes.  Their work encompassed a variety of artforms including painting, sculpture, architecture, theatre and music with an emphasis on violence, speed and the working classes.  The movement was in effect a celebration of the machine age, with a deliberately provocative tone. 

The Futurists were based primarily in Italy and were lead by the charismatic poet Filippo Marinetti who produced in 1908 the manifesto below;

“We want to fight ferociously against the fanatical, unconscious and snobbish religion of the past, which is nourished by the evil influence of museums.  We rebel against the supine admiration of old canvases, old statues and old objects, and against the enthusiasm for all that is worm-eaten, dirty and corroded by time; we believe that the common contempt for everything young, new and palpitating with life is unjust and criminal.”

Dynamism Of A Dog On A Leash, 1912, oil on canvas, 90 cm 110 cm

The movement was at it’s most active in the years 1909-14 and influenced the thinking of some artists in Britain (hence the Vorticists).  The depiction of movement or dynamism lay at the heart of much Futurist work, and artists developed some novel techniques to express speed and motion including blurring, repetition, and the use of lines of force.  And here, they adopted methods employed by the cubists.  This brings me to the work of Giacomo Balla.   

Balla was born in Turin in 1871 and is thought to have had little formal training in art.  He moved to Rome in his early 20s and gradually came under the influence of Marinetti.  Unlike most Futurists though, Balla was a lyrical painter and seemed less concerned with modern machines or violence.  His 1909 painting “Street Light - A Study of Light” is a dynamic depiction of light.  Futurism’s fascination with the urgency and energy of modern life is evident in this work.

Street Light, 1909, oil on canvas, 175 cm x 115 cm

In 1912 Balla produced “Dynamism Of A Dog On A Leash”, a playful exploration in the depiction of movement.  The influence of cubism is thought to be evident in this painting.  Reference has also been made to the principle of simultaneity in this work, that is; the rendering of motion by simultaneously showing many aspects of a moving object.  

During the First World War, Balla produced a number of abstract works in which he further explored the depiction of speed through the use of planes of colour.  These paintings are the most abstract of any produced by the futurists.  The exploration into the optical possibilities of photo-scientific research carried out by Eadweard Muybridge and others were also thought to be influential in the work of Balla.  This research gave Balla the opportunity to study the true nature of movement.  The French impressionist Edgar Degas was also heavily influenced by Muybridge’s work.

Abstract Speed & Sound, 1914, oil on board, 55 cm x 77 cm

The horrors of the First World War saw many artists turn away from the ideals of Futurism.  In his series “A History Of British Art” the art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon makes reference to the ‘machine gun’ philosophizing of the Vorticists and their joyful celebration of 20th Century technology.  He believes this worshiping of the modern and the streamlined was eventually to be seen as a hollow pose due to WW1.  “How can you celebrate technology when in war it can so effortlessly turn the human face into a bloodied abstract.”

Abstract Speed - The Car Has Passed, 1913, oil on canvas, 50 cm x 65 cm

The Futurist artists Umberto Boccioni and Antonio Sant’Elia both died in military service during WW1 and the influence of Futurism as a force in contemporary art waned after the conflict.  However, Balla remained true to the early principals of Futurism (without the violence) and later in his career returned to more figurative work.  He also designed futurist furniture and “anti-neutral” clothing.  He died in 1958.

References; 

The Art Story

A History of British Art - BBC TV

Brittanica.com

Wikipedia

Kathe Kollwitz - Artist With A Social Conscience

In her 77th year, Kathe Kollwitz (1867 – 1945) stated in her diary that it was her deepest desire to no longer live.  She believed that she was old enough to have the right to complete rest.  One of her friends claimed that she had a dialogue with death for most of her life. 

Woman With A Dead Child, 1903, etching dry point

She was the fifth child of seven.  She was a shy and anxious child and the deaths of three of her siblings, one prior to Käthe's own birth, exposed her at an early age to the quiet, eternal suffering of parental grief. Her mother’s stoicism, her concealed "deep sorrow" and emotional strength in the face of such loss had a powerful effect on Kathe and she would later incorporate these childhood observations into her own aesthetic depictions of mourning. 

Unemployment, 1909 etching and aquatint

In 1891 she married Karl Kollwitz who was trained as a doctor with a social conscience, they moved into their home in a disadvantaged area of Berlin where they were to remain for the next 50 years. Kathe’s work has to be seen against the rapid industrialization that occurred in late 19th and early 20th century Germany and the toll it was taking on the working class.  In 50 years Berlin’s population had swelled from 400,000 to 2 million.  The city had trouble coping and for many poverty became a way of life in a city containing slum tenements, housing thousands of textile workers who had flooded into the city in search of work.

The quiet, hard working life they led was undoubtedly good for her art.  Early in her career she was influenced by the 1892 play The Weavers by Gerhart Hauptmann, which portrayed a group of Salesian weavers who staged an uprising in the 1840’s over concerns about the industrial revolution.

Kathe began a series of prints based on the weavers.  Shortly after, her etchings won a gold medal at an academy show, but Kaiser Wilhelm II vetoed the award, describing her work as “gutter art” and a sin against the German people.  State approved art featured images of German power, but her career was established.  Another influence was the peasant’s war of the early 16th century.  She claimed that all her work was the distillation of her life and she acknowledges that she is a socialist artist.  This was due to the influences of her brother, father and literature of the period, but the real motive for choosing as a subject for her art the life of the workers “was that such subjects gave me in a simple and unqualified way what I considered to be beautiful.”

The Volunteers, 1923 woodcut

She got involved with the difficulties and challenges of proletarian life due to the women who came to her husband for help, unsolved problems of prostitution and unemployment grieved her and she determined to “keep on” with her studies of the working class.

She lost her youngest son Peter in World War 1, “everywhere beneath the surface are tears and bleeding wounds and yet the war goes on and follows other laws”. In her youth she wanted to mount the barricades of revolution, but in the wake of WW1 she wrote “I am and sick and tired of all the hatred in the world, I long for a socialism that lets men live free from murdering, from lying, from destroying and disfiguring, from all the devil’s work that the world has seen enough of.”

The Mothers, 1923 woodcut

During the years 1912 to 1920, Kollwitz produced very little finished work, labouring under depression she made many etchings but none were completed.  Having “come to a clear sense of her own past” she began to investigate the possibilities of sculpture and finally gave etching up.

Then she wanted to explore the possibilities of line work so she switched to woodcuts.  “It’s like a photographic plate that lies in the developer, the picture gradually becomes recognisable and emerges more and more from the mist.  Simplicity in feeling but expressing the totality of grief”, the war was still impacting on her art.

Memorial For Karl Liebknecht, 1919 a co-founder of the Marxist anti war Spartacus League who was executed in 1919 - woodcut

“It is my duty to voice the sufferings of man.  I want my art to have a purpose beyond itself and to wield influence.  Strength is what I need, it’s the one thing I need that seems worthy of succeeding Peter.  Strength to take life as it is and unbroken by life and without complaining and much weeping to do one’s work powerfully.”

For 14 years Kollwitz was a member of the Berlin Academy of the Arts, but was forced to resign following Adolf Hitler’s election victory in 1933 - her left leaning politics saw to that.  She gave consideration to returning to an old plan of producing a series of prints that focussed on the theme of death.  “I thought that now that I am really old, I might be able to handle this theme that would allow me to plumb the depths.  But that is not the case, at the very time when death becomes visible behind everything it disrupts the imaginative process”.   Images of the protective mother began to appear in her work during World War 2 and her home was destroyed during the bombing of Berlin.

The Grieving Parents, 1932 - a memorial to her son Peter, granite

At the end of her life she was hopeful that “other comrades can carry the banner forward”.   She died just a few weeks prior to war’s end. 

Käthe Kollwitz - Portrait of the German artist of expressionism,  Arts Council of Great Britain production 1981.

Art Of Germany – BBCTV  2010

The Art Story

Art In Tough Economic Times

The Morrison Government’s recent decision to roll the Department of Communication and the Arts into a new super Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Communications has drawn widespread condemnation from the arts community.  For a start, there is no mention of the arts in this new super department.  There is no reference to its arts responsibilities at all.

The arts haven’t always been treated with such callous disregard during tough economic times.  We only have to look back to what happened during the great depression in the United States to find a more enlightened attitude.

The Works Progress Administration was established by Franklin D Roosevelt shortly after he was elected US President in 1932.  It was part of his New Deal which involved massive programs to provide employment for the millions who were out of work.  The WPA provided programs to struggling writers and artists. 

Artists were commissioned to paint murals in post offices, town halls and railroad stations across the country.  And whilst this may have produced a lot of idealized kitsch, it did keep a lot of artists alive.  One such artist was Jack Levine. “Prior to the depression, many American artists were traveling to the left bank in Paris and were enjoying this hedonistic lifestyle until the money ran out, then they all returned to the US.  Many artists became very political and I became politicized out of my own poverty.  I didn’t have a dime.  I became very bitter and nobody wanted my work, so I went on the New Deal for a while and it felt as if someone had thrown me a life saver.”

Another WPA artist was Vincent Campanella “artists were able to see themselves as part of the working class and they saw themselves as free to be what they wanted to be under the WPA, painters who were free to paint the common life.  They were free to share opinions, share thoughts, share peoples financial difficulties, freedom to dedicate yourself and say I am a painter who is a human being and my fellow human beings are my subjects.”

Campanella’s portrait of Thomas Hart Benton

Corporations also encouraged public art at this time.  New York’s Rockefeller Centre is full of it.  There is a sample of it on the Associated Press Building by Isamu Noguchi. 

Isamu Noguchi

The famous photographer Lewis Hine worked as chief photographer for the WPA’s National Research Project, which studied changes in industry and their effect on employment.  During the depression he produced images of “worker as hero” to use Robert Hughes’ terminology including images of construction workers on the Empire State Building.

Lewis Hine Construction workers on the Empire State Building

Contrast all this to the Morrison Government’s attitude to the arts. The government denies that the arts has been downgraded by this decision, but the outgoing Secretary of the Departments of Communications and the Arts, Mike Mrdak disagrees.  In an email sent to his staff on the day the new super department was announced, Mrdak (pictured below) made his feelings plain.  "We were not permitted any opportunity to provide advice on the machinery of government changes, nor were our views ever sought on any proposal to abolish the department or to changes to our structure and operations."

Many bureaucrats are concerned a departmental secretary managing the competing demands of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Communications may never prioritise a Cabinet submission from Arts.

Needless to say this move by the Morrison Government has been labelled philistine, and it ignores recent studies showing the link between involvement in the arts and good mental health.  But to me, the argument goes beyond this.  It ignores the many thousands involved in the manufacture of artist’s materials, and their retailers.  And then there are the thousands of galleries across the country and their staff they employ, the performing arts, theatres and writers.  It’s an entire creative industry potentially being trashed by a government fixated on mining and infrastructure.  A 2017 report from the Department of Communications and the Arts stated that the “creative industries” contributed 6.4% to the nations GDP.

But what else would you expect from a third rate advertising man who got kicked out of Tourism Australia.  So we made him Prime Minister instead.

REFERENCES

ABC News Online

“American Visions”, Robert Hughes, ABC TV

“Big Sky, Big Dreams, Big Art, Made In The USA” , Waldemar Januszczak