Flower Power

An imaginative installation recalls an all-but-forgotten art movement

  • By Owen Edwards
  • Smithsonian magazine, April 2007, Subscribe
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Sculptor Giacomo Ballas spiky botanicals testify to his role as Futurisms lighthearted experimenter. Sculptor Giacomo Balla's spiky botanicals testify to his role as "Futurism's lighthearted experimenter."

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

 

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    Italy's early- to mid-20th-century Futurists eventually ended up—wouldn't you know?—haunted by their past. Led by the Italian poet Filippo Marinetti, who published The Futurist Manifesto in 1909, the movement was, appropriately enough, ahead of its time. Worshipers of machinery, industry and the seductions of raw power, the Futurists seemed to have catalyzed an aesthetic revolution bound for glory. Indeed, they would inspire artists, writers and composers in the middle years of the century.

    But while they were clearly onto ideas that would influence artists as diverse as the French painter Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) and American photographer and painter Charles Sheeler (1883-1965), the Futurists would void their own place in posterity. The movement's infatuation with speed and power was shared by Benito Mussolini, and when, in 1918, Marinetti made the distinct mistake of founding a political party based on the 1909 manifesto, Mussolini's burgeoning Fascisti absorbed it within a year. And there, in a manner of speaking, went the neighborhood.

    That association damned the movement in most of the art world, tainting the sculpture and painting of many talented Italian artists during and after World War II. Even now, Futurism's history has colored our perceptions of the work produced by its artists. Perhaps none deserves obscurity less than Giacomo Balla, a painter and sculptor of powerful originality who got involved with Marinetti in his late 30s, when he was already well established. Today, a series of his sculptures—antic, angular blooming flowers worked in wood, a witty spring bouquet—grace a third-floor gallery at the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. The pieces testify to Balla's contributions as "Futurism's lighthearted master experimenter," says Jeffrey Schnapp, director of the Stanford University Humanities Lab and an authority on modern Italian art. The artist, he adds, was "always eager for new adventures, from the comic to the sublime, from the 1910s well into the 1940s."

    The story of the dangerous liaison that eventually damaged the reputation of Balla and his fellow artists, however, is far from simple. According to Schnapp, "Futurism's complex pas de deux with Fascism is, in the end, reducible to the story of the ups and downs of the friendship between the two leaders, Marinetti and Mussolini." While the careers of both were interwoven, the poet and the dictator "were also in tension and sometimes even in open conflict," Schnapp says, "so we shouldn't fall into the trap of reducing Futurism to Fascism or vice versa. In fact, Marinetti's party platform called for the creation of an 'agitatorium' made up of members under 30 who would re-energize Italy's parliamentary democracy."

    Balla, who had begun sculpting in 1914, produced the plans and drawings for the flowers between 1918 and 1925. He intended the pieces to be mass-produced, in keeping with the Futurist desire to take fine art to the assembly line. "The flowers were not produced during Balla's lifetime, but in 1968, ten years after his death," says Hirshhorn curator Anne Ellegood. "Galleria dell'Obelisco in Rome had an edition of 40 made, and Joseph Hirshhorn bought one of these sets."

    The winds of war blasted away the esteem that Giacomo Balla—whose influence, Schnapp says, can be seen in American artists from Marsden Hartley to Joseph Stella—might have enjoyed had he and other Futurists chosen their friends more wisely (or had been chosen by other friends). The Hirshhorn's flower sculptures, and three additional pieces by Balla in the museum's collection, offer a timely opportunity to get back to the Futurists.

    Owen Edwards is a freelance writer and author of the book Elegant Solutions.


    Italy's early- to mid-20th-century Futurists eventually ended up—wouldn't you know?—haunted by their past. Led by the Italian poet Filippo Marinetti, who published The Futurist Manifesto in 1909, the movement was, appropriately enough, ahead of its time. Worshipers of machinery, industry and the seductions of raw power, the Futurists seemed to have catalyzed an aesthetic revolution bound for glory. Indeed, they would inspire artists, writers and composers in the middle years of the century.

    But while they were clearly onto ideas that would influence artists as diverse as the French painter Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) and American photographer and painter Charles Sheeler (1883-1965), the Futurists would void their own place in posterity. The movement's infatuation with speed and power was shared by Benito Mussolini, and when, in 1918, Marinetti made the distinct mistake of founding a political party based on the 1909 manifesto, Mussolini's burgeoning Fascisti absorbed it within a year. And there, in a manner of speaking, went the neighborhood.

    That association damned the movement in most of the art world, tainting the sculpture and painting of many talented Italian artists during and after World War II. Even now, Futurism's history has colored our perceptions of the work produced by its artists. Perhaps none deserves obscurity less than Giacomo Balla, a painter and sculptor of powerful originality who got involved with Marinetti in his late 30s, when he was already well established. Today, a series of his sculptures—antic, angular blooming flowers worked in wood, a witty spring bouquet—grace a third-floor gallery at the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. The pieces testify to Balla's contributions as "Futurism's lighthearted master experimenter," says Jeffrey Schnapp, director of the Stanford University Humanities Lab and an authority on modern Italian art. The artist, he adds, was "always eager for new adventures, from the comic to the sublime, from the 1910s well into the 1940s."

    The story of the dangerous liaison that eventually damaged the reputation of Balla and his fellow artists, however, is far from simple. According to Schnapp, "Futurism's complex pas de deux with Fascism is, in the end, reducible to the story of the ups and downs of the friendship between the two leaders, Marinetti and Mussolini." While the careers of both were interwoven, the poet and the dictator "were also in tension and sometimes even in open conflict," Schnapp says, "so we shouldn't fall into the trap of reducing Futurism to Fascism or vice versa. In fact, Marinetti's party platform called for the creation of an 'agitatorium' made up of members under 30 who would re-energize Italy's parliamentary democracy."

    Balla, who had begun sculpting in 1914, produced the plans and drawings for the flowers between 1918 and 1925. He intended the pieces to be mass-produced, in keeping with the Futurist desire to take fine art to the assembly line. "The flowers were not produced during Balla's lifetime, but in 1968, ten years after his death," says Hirshhorn curator Anne Ellegood. "Galleria dell'Obelisco in Rome had an edition of 40 made, and Joseph Hirshhorn bought one of these sets."

    The winds of war blasted away the esteem that Giacomo Balla—whose influence, Schnapp says, can be seen in American artists from Marsden Hartley to Joseph Stella—might have enjoyed had he and other Futurists chosen their friends more wisely (or had been chosen by other friends). The Hirshhorn's flower sculptures, and three additional pieces by Balla in the museum's collection, offer a timely opportunity to get back to the Futurists.

    Owen Edwards is a freelance writer and author of the book Elegant Solutions.

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