The teacher who joined his students’ revolution
Start with a fact that the painting itself never lets on: the man who made this giddy little picture of a dog on a walk was the grown-up in the room. Giacomo Balla (1871–1958; pronounced “JAH-ko-mo BAH-lah”) was born in Turin, in the industrial north of Italy, and by his late thirties he was an established, respectable painter working in Rome. He was the older one. He was the teacher. The hot young avant-garde painters of Rome came to him to learn how to handle paint.
What he taught them was a technique called Divisionism (the Italian cousin of French Pointillism). Both are the same basic idea: instead of mixing your colors on the palette and laying down a smooth blended green, you lay down separate little strokes and dots of pure unmixed color, a stroke of yellow next to a stroke of blue, and you let them mix in the viewer’s eye when they step back. The painting does its blending at a distance, optically, inside your head. (Hold onto that, because the divided-color habit never quite leaves Balla, and you’ll see it again in the dust of the road two chapters from now.) Among the students Balla taught this method were two names that matter a great deal to what happens next: Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916) and Gino Severini(1883–1966), both of whom would become major figures of the movement we’re heading toward.
Now the movement. In 1909, a Milanese poet named Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944) bought himself the front page of the Paris newspaper Le Figaro and published the Manifesto of Futurism, a roaring, deliberately outrageous declaration that the past was a tomb, museums were cemeteries, and the future belonged to speed, machines, the racing car, the airplane, the electric age. Futurism, the movement it kicked off, was the loudest of all the early-twentieth-century avant-gardes (the catch-all term for the experimental painters and writers who set out to break with everything that came before; literally French for “advance guard,” the soldiers who go out ahead of the army). Marinetti was its showman and its theorist. He wasn’t a painter. The painters wrote their own document the next year.
And here is the lovely inversion at the root of this whole picture. In 1910, Balla’s own former students, Boccioni and Severini among them, invited their old teacher to sign on to their new movement. He did. Balla is one of the five painters who signed the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting (published in April 1910), alongside Boccioni, Severini, Carlo Carrà and Luigi Russolo. So the older man who had taught the rebels their craft turned around and joined their rebellion. And of those five painter-signers, Balla would push the furthest of all toward pure abstraction, later canvases (the iridescent compositions, the Abstract Speed series) that drop the object entirely and paint only speed and light. Which is worth holding onto, because it makes the friendly, perfectly legible little dog you are about to meet an early, still-figurative moment from the most abstract painter the movement produced.