Piccolo autoritratto (Small Self- Portrait) is a good example of the artist’s inexhaustible imagination in reformulating the very concept of the self-portrait in an everchanging creative spirit. 

Giacomo Balla’s long career includes over ninety self-portraits stretching from the early to the late years. Like the tesserae of a mosaic, these works document the artist’s desire constantly to record the flow of different energies, sensibilities and states of mind, thus revealing his complex identity. From the first, dated 1894 (fig. 1)¹, which captures Balla’s intense, penetrating expression, it is possible to follow his countless faces step by step along an artistic trajectory of many phases and continual rethinking, the tangible and vital hallmark of unending exploration. The many vocabularies in which Balla addressed the self-portrait range from Realism and Divisionism to the extremes of the Futurist period and its abandonment during his maturity for a renewed interest in figuration. The overall analysis of the works in which Balla sought to represent his individuality also includes self-portraits in written form, short texts and freeword pictures, combinations of words and drawings, which are essential to any understanding of the artist’s absolute freedom as a multifaceted, metamorphic experimenter. 

Piccolo autoritratto (Small Self- Portrait) is a good example of the artist’s inexhaustible imagination in reformulating the very concept of the self-portrait in an everchanging creative spirit. In this case, it is the signature “BALLA FUTURISTA” that takes the place of the likeness accompanied by soaring lines and lively geometries in an elegant interplay of contrasts between flat expanses of colour and bold outlines. Purchased directly from the Balla family in 1960 for the illustrious collection of Lydia and Harry Lewis Winston, the work appeared in a major exhibition of the Winston Malbin Collection at the New York Guggenheim in 1973. The motif of the composition constitutes a sort of recurrent idea, almost a logo, on which Balla worked over the years, as in the drawing Mia Biografia (My Biography, 1925) on the back of a postcard sent to his fellow Futurist artist Fillìa, whose work is also in the Cerruti Collection (fig. 2)². 

Zelda De Lillo

¹Autoritratto in collezione privata, dipinto su carta fotografica sul retro di un dagherrotipo che ritrae l’artista a quattro anni. Si veda Alba 2016-2017, p. 24, fig. 1.

²Lista 1982, p. 348, n. 755A.