| Artist: | Balla, Giacomo |
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|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | Swifts: Paths of Movement | |
| Date of Work: | 1913 | |
| Nationality: | Italian | |
| Context: | Pre-WWI | |
| Movement: | Italian Futurism | |
| Medium: | oil paint on canvas | |
| Subject: Balla expresses the dynamism of birds in flight through this mapping of the paths of movement made by flying swifts (a type of bird). The Futurist doctrine of dynamism held that energy runs through matter and man; all objects, people, and masses are potential energy. Nothing is static according to the theory of dynamism; energy is always in motion. The Futurists celebrate speed and energy; they cannot go fast enough. Here Balla, like Boccioni, is less interested in portraying the bird or subject than he is in portraying speed itself. He differs from Boccioni, however, in that he likes to analyze speed by showing successive moments, like successive frames of a film. Boccioni felt that those successive stages were each too static in their own right, and he argued for simultaneity rather than succession. Boccioni did not want to analyze motion he wanted to be swept up in it. Balla, however, loves the trajectories of movement these vector lines become his true subject. Style: emphasis is put on movement and action to express dynamism; the Futurists are in revolt against the static. They equate dynamism - energy - matter - light as being all one in the same; thus, all things fuse and move. Their aggressive aesthetic is played out in lines of force that cut through the field. Context: one year before the outbreak of WWI. Italy is going through its own cultural crisis. It is an old country with a long, rich cultural history caught between its glorious past and its modern present. While de Chirico's deserted city squares and train stations haunt one with a sense of inertia and paralysis, as if caught in a time warp, the Futurists launch us forward at a dizzying speed into the modern world. They want to leave the past behind so badly that they are not even content with catching up to the present; they want to push forward to the future. They thus embrace all things modern, celebrating the big city and the machine; in Marinetti's 1909 Futurist Manifesto, they boldly reject the past, urging their followers to burn down the academies and the museums, and they forbid anyone to paint the nude (which they consider a dated subject) for ten years! In order to drag Italy into the modern world and do away with the old, they enthusiastically look forward to war. Trouble is, most of them did not live long enough to have much of a future. Futurism itself proved to be a short-lived movement since many of its members were killed early on in the war. | ||
