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Gino Severini (7 April 1883–26 February 1966), was an Italian painter and a leading member of the Futurist movement. For much of his life he divided his time between Paris and Rome. He was associated with neo-classicism and the "return to order" in the decade after the First World War. During his career he worked in a variety of media, including mosaic and fresco. He showed his work at major exhibitions, including the Rome Quadrennial, and won art prizes from major institutions.

Early life

Severini was born into a poor family in Cortona, Italy. His father was a junior court official and his mother a dressmaker. He studied at the Scuola Tecnica in Cortona until the age of fifteen, when he was expelled from the entire Italian school system for the theft of exam papers. For a while he worked with his father. Then in 1899 he moved to Rome with his mother. It was there that he first showed a serious interest in art, painting in his spare time while working as a shipping clerk. With the help of a patron of Cortonese origins he attended art classes, enrolling in the free school for nude studies (an annex of the Rome Fine Art Institute) and a private academy. His formal art education ended after two years when his patron stopped his allowance, declaring, "I absolutely do not understand your lack of order."^[1]

In 1900 he met the painter Umberto Boccioni. Together they visited the studio of Giacomo Balla, where they were introduced to the technique of Divisionism, painting with divided rather than mixed color and breaking the painted surface into a field of stippled dots and stripes. The ideas of Divisionism had a great influence on Severini's early work and on Futurist painting from 1910 to 1911.

Severini settled in Paris in November 1906. The move was momentous for him. He said later, "The cities to which I feel most strongly bound are Cortona and Paris: I was born physically in the first, intellectually and spiritually in the second."^[2] He lived in Montmartre and dedicated himself to painting. There he met most of the rising artists of the period, befriending Amedeo Modigliani and occupying a studio next to those of Raoul Dufy, George Braque and Suzanne Valadon. He knew most of the Parisian avant-garde, including Juan Gris, Pablo Picasso, Lugné-Poë and his theatrical circle, the poets Guillaume Apollinaire, Paul Fort, and Max Jacob, and author Jules Romains. The sale of his work did not provide enough to live on and he depended on the generosity of patrons.

Futurism

He was invited by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Boccioni to join the Futurist movement and was a co-signatory, with Balla, Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, and Luigi Russolo, of the Manifesto of the Futurist Painters in February 1910 and the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting in April the same year. He was an important link between artists in France and Italy and came into contact with Cubism before his Futurist colleagues. Following a visit to Paris in 1911, the Italian Futurists adopted a sort of Cubism, which gave them a means of analysing energy in paintings and expressing dynamism. Severini helped to organize the first Futurist exhibition outside Italy at Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris, in February 1912 and participated in subsequent Futurist shows in Europe and the United States. In 1913, he had solo exhibitions at the Marlborough Gallery, London, and Der Sturm, Berlin.

In his autobiography, written many years later, he records that the Futurists were pleased with the response to the exhibition at Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, but that influential critics, notably Apollinaire, mocked them for their pretentions, their ignorance of the main currents of modern art and their provincialism. Severini later came to agree with Apollinaire.^[1]

Severini was less attracted to the subject of the machine than his fellow Futurists and frequently chose the form of the dancer to express Futurist theories of dynamism in art. He was particularly adept at rendering lively urban scenes, for example in Dynamic Hieroglyph of the Bal Tabarin (1912) and The Boulevard (1913). During the First World War he produced some of the finest Futurist war art, notably his Italian Lancers at a Gallop (1915) and Armoured Train (1915).

Neo-classicism

Mosaic by Severini decorating the Church of St.Mark in Cortona, Italy.

After 1920 he divided his time between Paris and Rome.

Severini abandoned Futurism after the First World War and was part of the "return to order", becoming interested in a more conservative, analytic type of painting and making a study of Giotto. For a time he worked in a Synthetic Cubist mode, but with the publication of Du cubisme au classicisme in 1916 he departed from Cubist purism and adopted a neo-classical style with metaphysical overtones. By 1920 he was applying theories of classical balance based on the Golden Section to figurative subjects from the traditional Commedia dell’arte.

In 1923 he took part in the Rome Biennale. He exhibited in Milan with artists of the Novecento Italiano group in 1926 and 1929 and in their Geneva exhibition of 1929. From 1928 he began to incorporate elements of Rome's classical landscape in his work. In 1930 he took part in the Venice Biennale, exhibited in the Rome Quadrennials of 1931 and 1935, and in 1935 won the first prize for painting, with an entire room devoted to his work. He contributed a cycle of works to the Paris Exhibition. He explored fresco and mosaic techniques and executed murals in various media in Switzerland, France, and Italy.

Later life

In the 1940s Severini's style became semi-abstract. In the 1950s he returned to his Futurist subjects: dancers, light and movement. He executed commissions for the church of Saint-Pierre in Freiburg and inaugurated the Conségna delle Chiavi ("Delivery of the Keys") mosaic. His mosaics were shown at the Cahiers d'Art gallery in Paris and he participated in a conference on the history of mosaic at Ravenna. He received commissions to decorate the offices of KLM in Rome and Alitalia in Paris and took part in the exhibition The Futurists, Balla - Severini 1912–1918 at the Rose Fried Gallery in New York. In Rome he reconstructed his Pan Pan Dance mosaic, which had been destroyed in the war. He was awarded the Premio Nazionale di Pittura of the Accademia di San Luca in Rome, exhibited at the 9th Rome Quadrennal and was given a solo exhibition at the Accademia di San Luca.

Throughout his career he published important theoretical essays and books on art. There is an autobiography, The Life of a Painter.

Severini died in Paris on February 26, 1966, aged 82. He was buried at Cortona.

See also

• Futurism
• Art manifesto

References

• Biography of Severini in the Guide to Cortona
• Cowling, Elizabeth; Mundy, Jennifer, On Classic Ground: Picasso, Léger, de Chirico and the New Classicism 1910–1930, London: Tate Gallery. ISBN 1-85437-043-X

External links

• MoMA collection, retrieved April 7, 2008
• Radical Light - Exhibition of Divisionist painting at the National Gallery, London

From Wikiquote

Gino Severini (Cortona, 7 April 1883 – 26 February 1966), was an Italian painter and a leading member of the Futurist movement and signed in 1910 the Manifesto of the Futurists together with his fellow Italians: Boccione, Carrà and Balla. Later, Cubism attracted him more. For much of his life he divided his time between Paris and Rome. He was associated with neo-classicism and the "return to order" in the decade after the First World War. He was strongly influenced by Seurat’s theory on light and division of colours.

Sourced

• In our young days, when Modigliani and I first came to Paris, in 1906, nobody was very clear about ideas. But unconsciously, we knew quite a lot of things, of which we became aware later on. (1956)
  • as quoted in Letters of the great artists, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson , London, 1963, p. 247 (translation Daphne Woodward)

• It was during the first years (1906-1910, fh) the we realized the presence of a dualism deep down within us, where another person, whom we ourselves do not know, tends, at the moment of the creative act, to supplant the person we believe ourselves to be and would like to be. It is difficult to bring these two individualities into accord, yet it is upon this accord that the development of a personality largely depends. My first contact with the art of Seurat whom I adopted, once and for all, as my master, did a great deal to help me to express myself in terms of the two simultaneous and often opposed aspirations. This opposition caused me much mental torture, I must admit.. (1956)
  • as quoted in Letters of the great artists, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson , London, 1963, p. 247 (translation Daphne Woodward)

• ..since then I have found consolation in Blake; 'Without Contraries is no progression', he says in his Proverbs of Hell. And Baudelaire’s idea that 'Variety is an essential condition of life' seems to me to be in perfect accord with my aspirations and with my intention, as a Futurist painter, to put life in the place occupied by reasoning in the art of the Cubist period.
  • as quoted in Letters of the great artists, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson , London, 1963, p. 247 (translation Daphne Woodward)

• In the early days the Cubists’ method of grasping an object was to go round and round it (round the object, fh); the futurists declared that one had to get inside it (inside the object, fh). In my opinion the two views can be reconciled in a poetic cognition of the world. But to the very fact that they appealed to the creative depths in the painter by awakening in him hidden forces which were intuitive and vitalizing, the Futurist theories did more than the Cubist principles to open up unexplored and boundless horizons.
  • as quoted in Letters of the great artists, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson , London, 1963, p. 248 (translation Daphne Woodward)

• The intellectual abstraction of the second (analytical, fh) period of Cubism was of great importance, however. By its aspirations to the eternal and its "concept of proportion inspired by the Classics" it revived the sense of craftsmanship concept in many painters. And this perfectly coincided with another of my ambitions – which was to make, with paint, an object having the same perfection of craftsmanship that a cabinet-maker would put into a piece of furniture.
  • as quoted in Letters of the great artists, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson , London, 1963, p. 248 (translation Daphne Woodward)

• It should also be born in mind that the research on ‘movement’ and the dynamic outlook on the world, which were the basis of Futurist theory, in no way required one to paint nothing but speeding cars or ballerinas in action; for a person who is seated, or an inanimate object, though apparently static, could be considered dynamically and suggest dynamic forms. I may mention as an example the 'Portrait of Madame S.' (1912) and the 'Seated Woman' (1914).
  • as quoted in Letters of the great artists, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson , London, 1963, p. 248 (translation Daphne Woodward)

• Futurism and Cubism are comparable in importance tot the invention of perspective, for which they substituted a new concept op space. All subsequent movements were latent in them or brought about by them.. ..the two movements cannot be regarded as in opposition to each other, even though they started from opposite points; I maintain (an idea approved by Apollinaire and later by Matisse) that they are two extremes of the same sign, tending to coincide at certain points which only the poetic instinct of the painter can discover: poetry being the content and raison d’être of art.
  • as quoted in Letters of the great artists, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson , London, 1963, p. 248-249 (translation Daphne Woodward)

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Gino Severini