Streetlight by Giacamo Balla – 1910 – Museum of Modern Art, New York

If you were an artist preparing to paint a picture, depicting a lamp post might not be your first choice of subject matter. It certainly wouldn’t have been the go-to subject for most painters in the early twentieth century But in 1910 or 1911, the Futurist painter Giacomo Balla painted a large canvas displaying a huge electric street light, on a canvas that is over five feet tall, with a diminutive moon in the corner. Why would he have made such a choice?

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