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Can you imagine being so enthusiastic about technology that you name your daughter Propeller? Today, we take most technological advances for granted, but at the turn of the last century, innovations like electricity, x-rays, radio waves, automobiles, and airplanes were extremely exciting. Italy lagged Britain, France, Germany, and the United States in the pace of its industrial development. Culturally speaking, the country’s artistic reputation was grounded in ancient, Renaissance, and baroque art and culture. Simply put, Italy represented the past.

In the early 1900s, a group of young and rebellious Italian writers and artists emerged, determined to celebrate industrialization. They were frustrated by Italy’s declining status and believed that the “Machine Age” would result in an entirely new world order and even a renewed consciousness.

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the ringleader of this group, called the movement futurism. Its members sought to capture the idea of modernity, the sensations and aesthetics of speed, movement, and industrial development.

Marinetti launched futurism in 1909 with the publication of his “Futurist Manifesto” on the front page of the French newspaper Le Figaro. The manifesto set a fiery tone. In it, Marinetti lashed out against cultural tradition (passatismo, in Italian) and called for the destruction of museums, libraries, and feminism. Futurism quickly grew into an international movement, and its participants issued additional manifestos for nearly every type of art: painting, sculpture, architecture, music, photography, cinema—and even clothing.

The futurist painters—Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Gino Severini, and Giacomo Balla—signed their first manifesto in 1910 (Balla named his daughter Elica—which means Propeller!). Futurist painting had first looked to the color and the optical experiments of the late 19th century, but in the fall of 1911, Marinetti and the futurist painters visited the Salon d’Automne in Paris and saw Cubism in person for the first time. Cubism had an immediate impact that can be seen in Boccioni’s Materia of 1912, for example. Nevertheless, the futurists declared their work to be completely original.

Street Light, Balla

If you were an artist preparing to paint a picture, depicting a lamp post might not be your first choice of subject matter. It certainly wouldn’t have been the go-to subject for most painters in the early 20th century: a human figure, a landscape, or a still life would have been more standard choices. But in 1910 or 1911, the futurist painter Giacomo Balla painted a huge electric street light on a canvas that is over five feet tall, with a diminutive moon in the corner. Why would he have made such a choice?

As a member of the Italian futurist movement, Balla was passionately invested in making art that reflected “the future”: the increasingly industrialized and technological world of the early 20th century. As a result of Marinetti's Manifesto, futurism swept onto the European art scene in 1909. He declared that reverence for history and past artistic traditions needed to be abandoned in order to move society and art decisively into the modern age. In embracing modernity and violently dismissing Italy’s honored artistic heritage (“Set fire to the library shelves! Turn aside the canals to flood the museums!” he wrote), Marinetti initiated one of the most bombastic and aggressive avant-garde movements of his time. The writer prized new technology rather than tradition and sought to create a climate of violent revolution rather than one of comfortable stability. The artists who gathered around him aimed to make art that would showcase modern mechanical developments like airplanes and automobiles, especially because they could provide the viewer with new experiences, like the speed of these new modes of transport.

Balla’s Street Light, in this sense, is a sort of demonstration piece for the futurist movement. Balla has rejected traditional subject matter in this painting, and instead has painted an object that is forthrightly modern and technological: one of the new, electric street lamps that were just being installed at this time in Rome, where Balla lived. The introduction of electrified city lighting must have been an exciting sign of technological advancement for the futurists and a powerful symbol of how the ancient city of Rome was finally abandoning its past and entering the modern age.

The small crescent moon Balla included in his painting is also an illustration of futurist ideas. Just as the street light stands for the future in the picture, the small moon stands for the past. In part, Balla means this in a literal sense. In the past, people relied on the moon to see at night; in modern times, we rely on electricity. But Balla is also alluding to a number of Marinetti’s writings in which the moon was used as a symbol for the artistic traditionalism that the futurists wanted to destroy. Summed up in his slogan “Let’s kill the moonlight!” Marinetti attacked the gentle light of the moon and its long association with traditional romance and sentimentality. He condemned past generations of artists and poets as “lovers of the moon” and called for a more modern and aggressive symbol—like a racing car or a train—to take its place. Balla’s Street Light, which overpowers the moon’s dim light, serves as a visual equivalent to these ideas.

Balla was one of the older members of the futurist movement, and he had already established a career as a painter by 1909, when futurism was founded. Before joining the futurists, Balla had been working in one of the styles popular in late 19th-century Europe, which art historians often term postimpressionism. In Italy, one of the most prominent postimpressionist styles was divisionism, so named because it was based on dividing colors into their constituent parts on the canvas and letting brushstrokes remain visible instead of smoothly blending them together (Georges Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte is one of the best-known examples of divisionism). Since Street Light was painted early in the futurist movement, Balla’s style here is still essentially divisionist in its approach. Balla uses obvious, bold brushstrokes in a repeated V-shaped pattern to illustrate the light and energy radiating from the lamp. The saturated colors of Street Light—from the almost blinding white and yellow at the center of the lamp to the cooler hues further from the light’s bulb—are also typically divisionist.

Street Light seems to have been enthusiastically received by Balla’s fellow painters when it was completed. In a group manifesto written in 1910, titled “Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto,” the work is showcased as a superb example of futurist subject and style: the group exalts the “electric lamp, which, with spasmodic starts, shrieks out the most heartrending expressions of color.”

Despite these claims, Balla and the other futurist painters would soon abandon the divisionist style, since it ultimately seemed too tied to past generations to be truly “of the future.” After the futurists visited Paris together in 1911, several of them adopted aspects of cubism, though they altered the technique to focus more clearly on futurist concerns like modern technology, movement, and speed. Balla, however, began to earnestly explore how one might paint movement in other ways. At first, in a series of paintings in 1912, he showed movement by painting many small increments of time in a series, as in Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash.

Later, in 1912 and into 1913, Balla entered an exploratory abstract phase, painting the movement of cars driving, birds in flight, and even the movement of light itself, via geometric shapes, dynamic lines, and abstract patterns of color. These paintings, such as Abstract Speed, put Balla at the forefront of European artists who were pioneering total abstraction in their work. Street Light, painted just a few years before these experiments, was a visual manifesto that ultimately helped drive the futurist movement in these new directions.

Reception

Futurism was one of the most politicized art movements of the 20th century. It merged artistic and political agendas in order to propel change in Italy and across Europe. The futurists would hold what they called serate futuriste, or futurist evenings, where they would recite poems and display art, while also shouting politically charged rhetoric at the audience in the hope of inciting a riot. They believed that agitation and destruction would end the status quo and allow for the regeneration of a stronger, energized Italy.

These positions led the futurists to support the coming war, and like most of the group’s members, leading painter Boccioni enlisted in the army during World War I. He was trampled to death after falling from a horse during training. After the war, the members’ intense nationalism led to an alliance with Benito Mussolini and his National Fascist Party. Although futurism continued to develop new areas of focus (aeropittura, for example) and attracted new members—the so-called “second generation” of futurist artists—the movement’s strong ties to fascism have complicated the study of this historically significant art.