“This period also saw the splendid head of a young woman painted in the studio of the sculptor Prini. The beautiful girl was Prini’s niece and he captured that superb expression of youth quickly and deeply, painting with brick dust from the floor mixed with black and white pastel. Simple and vast in vision, the neck and face perfectly modelled; though monochrome, with just a touch of the warmth of brick, this pastel has all the life and charm of the colours of youth.”

Giacomo Balla, who would become one of the founders of Futurism, began his career as a painter in the Divisionist climate, developing an interest in attaining a certain luminosity that would continue into his subsequent works. In 1855 he moved from his birthplace of Turin to Rome, a city where his painting began to feature works dedicated to the urban landscape and subjects of a social nature, in which his gaze fluctuates between a photographic neutrality and a tragically human sentiment. However, over and beyond these painterly orientations,
by the early 20th century Balla was an established and prolific portrait painter, immortalising important figures of the middle class and aristocracy but also young fellow artists, friends and people close to him. This genre offered Balla an opportunity to experiment with pictorial techniques.
Seeking to capture the vibrant mobility of light in every aspect of reality, Balla did not hesitate to change register frequently, ranging from monochrome compositions of a realist nature to the bright, glowing colours of his Divisionist works.
As his daughter Elica writes: 

“This period also saw the splendid head of a young woman painted in the studio of the sculptor Prini. The beautiful girl was Prini’s niece and he captured that superb expression of youth quickly and deeply, painting with brick dust from the floor mixed with black and white pastel. Simple and vast in vision, the neck and face perfectly modelled; though monochrome, with just a touch of the warmth of brick, this pastel has all the life and charm of the colours of youth.”2 

Like the handling of light to capture the sculptural volume of the face and the long neck, the modern character of the composition reveals close links with photography, a passion that Balla inherited from his father and cultivated all through the years of his training in Turin, where he worked in the studio of Pietro Paolo Bertieri at the age of twenty. Highly esteemed in Italy and abroad, Bertieri was renowned for the modern approach of his photographic portraits, using light alone to reveal the subject’s individuality and replacing the customary studio décor with settings free of redundant elements.

Balla drew upon this experience in his portraits, where light again plays the key part in endowing the image with aesthetic and psychological qualities. This pastel provides a good example. Against a dark background, the light entering from the left picks out the slightly foreshortened face and the long white neck of the young woman in an unusual pose of youthful innocence. It was the work’s first owner, the architect Garibaldi Burba, that dubbed her “La Seducente”. 

The influence of photography is also evident in the sense of motion generated by the handling of light, almost as though to suggest a vibrant and dynamic impulse pervading the figure, further emphasised by the quick strokes of white pastel that start from the dress and stretch out over the neck and face. The frame made by the artist helps to underscore the unconventional nature of the composition. This was a recurrent element in the work of Balla,3 who saw the frame not as a simple object to contain the image but as an integral part of the work itself. In this case, the curve of the upper right section follows the roundness of the head, emphasising the off-centre pose and balancing the sinuous line of the neck. The signature in the bottom left is a further example of Balla’s disregard for convention, as the letters are arranged vertically inside a small rectangle almost like a label. That this is no chance element but wholly deliberate is also demonstrated by the fact that the surface of the paper was left exposed in that small space. 

[Zelda De Lillo]

¹ According to an oral communication from Liliana De Matteis, the work was bought by Cerruti from the Galleria Martano on 30 November 1982 (e-mail from Liliana De Matteis to Fabio Cafagna, 12 March 2019).

² Balla 1984, p. 99.

³ For the importance of the frame in Balla’s works, see E. Gigli, “Futur-cornice”, in Milan 2008b.