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Lot Essay
After Boccioni's death at the front in 1916 it was Balla who established himself as the leading artist of the Futurist movement. At the end of the First World War after four years of continuous mechanised slaughter Balla turned away from his exploration of speed and the "lines of force" produced by modern machinery in favour of new researches that explored the inherent dynamism of the natural world. By 1920 his research had led him to develop an increasingly spiritual view of life that began to manifest itself in his art. Dinamismo Andamentale (Directional Dynamism) is a fully resolved semi-abstract composition that belongs to the period circa 1923 when Balla was working on his Futurist masterpiece Pessimismo e ottimismo (Pessimism and Optimism).
With its gentle swirling lines and carefully orchestrated balance of coloured shapes combining to form a tight compositional unity, Dinamismo Andamentale echoes Balla's pictorial explorations of the flight paths of swifts. Adopting this age-old practice of soothsayers Balla, like Leonardo before him, sought to identify the underlying linear rhythms of nature through the study of such elements. In the early 1920s he returned to such exploration and combined it with his strongly hermetic and what he called 'spiritist' view of life to create an increasingly decorative art that owed much to Jugendstil. His work as a set and costume designer for the stage and ballet in the immediate post-war period also encouraged this tendency towards decoration and as a result he increasingly sought to expand the Futurist aesthetic into all areas of life with the ultimate aim of creating a complete Futurist environment. His modestly titled Manifesto for the Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe written with Depero in 1915 had outlined a program for this stating: "We shall find abstract equivalents for all the forms and all the elements of the universe, then we shall combine them together according to the caprice of our inspiration, to form plastic ensembles that we shall set in movement." (Cited in Futurism and Futurisms : exhib.cat. Palazzo Grassi, Venice, 1986, p. 425.)
Dinamismo Andamentale is a clear product of this philosophy appearing to be a colourful abstract portrait of rhythmic air currents in the same manner as Balla's "densities of atmosphere" which informed the lighter, more ethereal and optimistic half of his painting Pessimismo e ottimismo. Swirling in an 'S' bend through the centre of the painting Balla has used only four colours to create an abstract patterning of flat form that persuasively conveys a sense of the ever-changing rhythm of Nature.
With its gentle swirling lines and carefully orchestrated balance of coloured shapes combining to form a tight compositional unity, Dinamismo Andamentale echoes Balla's pictorial explorations of the flight paths of swifts. Adopting this age-old practice of soothsayers Balla, like Leonardo before him, sought to identify the underlying linear rhythms of nature through the study of such elements. In the early 1920s he returned to such exploration and combined it with his strongly hermetic and what he called 'spiritist' view of life to create an increasingly decorative art that owed much to Jugendstil. His work as a set and costume designer for the stage and ballet in the immediate post-war period also encouraged this tendency towards decoration and as a result he increasingly sought to expand the Futurist aesthetic into all areas of life with the ultimate aim of creating a complete Futurist environment. His modestly titled Manifesto for the Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe written with Depero in 1915 had outlined a program for this stating: "We shall find abstract equivalents for all the forms and all the elements of the universe, then we shall combine them together according to the caprice of our inspiration, to form plastic ensembles that we shall set in movement." (Cited in Futurism and Futurisms : exhib.cat. Palazzo Grassi, Venice, 1986, p. 425.)
Dinamismo Andamentale is a clear product of this philosophy appearing to be a colourful abstract portrait of rhythmic air currents in the same manner as Balla's "densities of atmosphere" which informed the lighter, more ethereal and optimistic half of his painting Pessimismo e ottimismo. Swirling in an 'S' bend through the centre of the painting Balla has used only four colours to create an abstract patterning of flat form that persuasively conveys a sense of the ever-changing rhythm of Nature.