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| Image | Sale date | Auction house | Location | Sale name | Lot No. | Estimate | Price Sold | Condition | Title |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Jun 4, 2019 | Dorotheum | Vienna | Modern Art | 11 | $****** - ****** | Autosmorfia |
paintings
42.2 x 31.2 cm (16.61 x 12.28 in)
oil on wood panel
signed Balla
Atelier of the artist, Rome
E. Coppola Collection, Rome (handwritten on the reverse: proprietà Coppola), acquired from the artist’s atelier in 1968 and thence by inheritance
Private Collection, Italy
Rome, Balla pre-futurista, Galleria dell’Obelisco, January/February 1968,
exh. cat. p. 12, no. 4 with ill. (with wrong dimensions)
Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco, Balla pre-futurista, Bulzoni ed., Rome 1968,
p. 39, no. 15, p. 12 with ill.
Teresa Fiori, Archivi del Divisionismo, De Luca ed., Rome 1969, vol. II,
no. X.22, pl. 1710 with ill.
Elica Balla, Con Balla, Multipla ed., Milan 1984, vol. I, p. 32 with ill.
signed Balla, oil on wood panel, 42.2 x 31.2 cm
Photo certificate:
Elena Gigli, Rome, no. 827, 2018
Provenance:
Atelier of the artist, Rome
E. Coppola Collection, Rome (handwritten on the reverse: proprietà Coppola), acquired from the artist's studio in 1968 and thence by inheritance
Private Collection, Italy
Exhibited:
Rome, Balla Pre-futurista, Galleria dell'Obelisco, January / February 1968,
exh. cat. p. 12, no. 4 with ill. (with wrong dimensions)
Literature:
Maurizio Fagiolo dell'Arco, Balla pre-Futurista, Bulzoni ed., Rome 1968,
p. 39, no. 15, p. 12 with ill.
Teresa Fiori, Archivi del Divisionismo, De Luca ed., Rome 1969, vol. II
no. X.22, pl. 1710 with ill.
Elica Balla, Con Balla, Multipla ed., Milan 1984, vol. I, p. 32 with ill.
The painter before the mirror
The interest in the psyche of the subject, which in the sixteenth century was culturally rooted in the pseudo-scientific thought of the era, based on magical, alchemical, and physiognomic elements, took a modern, rational, and scientific turn in the matter seventeenth century. The study of this rationality and the human spirit began to characterize numerous portraits and self-portraits of the era. Gian Lorenzo Bernini's work provides an eloquent example of this and demonstrates notable immediacy and effective psychological introspection. Interior investigation and autobiographical reflection are therefore central elements in the work of European artists, especially that of Rembrandt. On a par with Dürer, he tenaciously dedicated himself to self-portraiture, leaving forty-six self-portraits, both drawn and painted, which condense all the strands typical of sixteenth-century production. It was these very targeted, introspective self-portraits that conveyed Rembrandt's Growing Disease on Canvas, which lent him the intuition to work out his progressive disintegration in his brush strokes and the material substance which progressively erased the traces of the bright, sharp precision of the paintings of his youth. It was this stylistic path that elicited the wonder of his contemporaries and whose sole precedent was Titian's "non finito" (unfinished) works. Rembrandt's research draws the period of experimentation and classification of self-portrait to a close, a period which lasted approximately from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, and which conferred the genre with autonomy and autonomy within the European artistic tradition.
In the eighteenth century, in the so-called "character heads" of Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736-1783), defined by Rudolf Wittkower as the "test bed for the study of problems relating to artists and insanity. "Bernini who created two character heads for Cardinal Foix De Montoya in 1619 titled" The Blessed Soul "and" The Damned Soul ". If Bernini's intent is to study human character and passions, Messerschmidt conveys the figure of a saturnine artist, extravagant and fatally absorbed in an individualistic and unsharp representation of reality, of himself, and of his art. Among the artists of the nineteenth century the self-portrait in an organic context within the artist's own career. Gustave Courbet's (1844-49) The Desperate Man, Self-portrait, appears to convey the apparent reflection of his image in the mirror, with quasi-hyperrealist precision. It was psychoanalysis, developed by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) in the early years of the twentieth century, that was to give rise to an Oedipal turn in art, with subjective pictorial experiments which drew on regressive dreams and erotic fantasies, as appears evident in the work of Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Oscar Kokoschka. Vienna at that time did not tolerate such experiments as they suggested a crisis in the stability of the self and of social institutions, a crisis which was quick to analyze, and which was more than just the Austrian capital alone. Early twentieth-century Italy saw the birth of a more "humane and genuine" art, especially in the so-called "little novel avant-garde" (Cena, Pellizza da Volpedo, Balla, Prini), inspired by present reality and with a fundamental idealism tinged with sentimental and psychological accents, and a very intense humanitarian charge. This is the period in which Balla experimented with his "grimace" with his large tuft of red hair and bohemian neckerchief. It is 1900, the year of the Paris Universal Exposition. The "City of Light" is more scintillating than ever. The young Giacomo Balla is 29 years old, and in Paris since September, guest of the artist Serafino Macchiati. "Let's try again ... I go to Paris. There, there will be great art, and one can learn from the great masters, "the painter wrote to Elisa, his wife. He visited the Louvre, where he was among the canvases of the Old Masters, so he came across the self-portrait of the Dutch artist Adrien Brouwer and La Haine and the film by Vucetic. Writing again to Elisa: "(...) After breakfast, I continue to paint the most extravagant grimaces (they are SELF-GRIMACES), I want to do several, and then attempt to sell them."
The "self-grimace" (Autosmorfia) is an image in motion which anticipates later experimental analysis as the girl runs on the balcony, the flight of the swallows or the speed of the car. But it is also something different, already attempted in a series of self-portraits, from 1894 on, exploring the expressive potential of the human face.
Self-portraits, Balla is also interested in the issue of communicating what it means to be: truth or love, joy, or the visualization of fears and hidden obsessions. The myth of narcissus teaches us one absolute fiction or unconscious truth, and that on the psychoanalytical canvas the modern artist distinguishes himself from his predecessors through turning down eternity in favor of consciousness and aspiring to self-portraiture.
