Gino Severini (1883-1966)
Born Cortona, 7 April 1883; died Paris, 26 Feb 1966.
Italian painter, mosaicist, stage designer and writer. One of the principal exponents of Futurism, he was an important link between French and Italian art. Although his most historically significant works were produced before World War I, he had a long career during which he continued to evolve his style, particularly in abstract schemes.
1. Early work and Futurism, to 1915.
Severini studied in Cortona until the age of 15 when, because of a prank, he was expelled from all Italian schools. In 1899 he moved with his mother to Rome, where he worked as an accountant for a pipe-maker and later for an export agency. His passion for art led him to attend an evening class in drawing at a school known as ‘Gli incurabili’, and in the morning he studied perspective. Together with a group of friends that included Umberto Boccioni, whom he met in 1901, he was introduced to the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, the Russian novelists and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and to the general principles of Marxism. With Boccioni he often visited the studio of Giacomo Balla, who had recently returned from Paris, and learnt from him the technique of Divisionism.
Severini’s first oil paintings reflect a teaching that concentrated on the values of light and the perspective solutions of the overall composition. His early rural landscapes were still dominated by a strongly realistic approach, though they were without chiaroscuro or tonal effects; a few of them were exhibited at the annual exhibition in Rome of the Amatori e Cultori in 1903 and 1904. After a brief period in Florence, where he painted some copies of works in the Uffizi on commission, he returned to Rome and contributed some portraits in a populist mode for covers of the Sunday edition of the Socialist newspaper Avanti.
In the autumn of 1906, by now disappointed with the provincial and academic climate of the Italian capital, Severini left for Paris. After the first difficult and poverty-stricken months, he came into contact with the intellectual world of writers and artists gravitating around the Montmartre district and became acquainted with Modigliani, Maurice Raynal, Picasso, Gris, Braque and Max Jacob. He was particularly struck by the Impressionist paintings displayed at the Musée du Luxembourg. Now he became fully aware of the importance of Balla’s teaching and of the need to break away completely from an excessively naturalistic approach. With regard to his experience in Paris, Severini later wrote: ‘Now people spoke of rhythm, volume and three-dimensional space in bodies; they spoke of colour and design for their own sake, not in relation to real things’ (La vita di un pittore (Milan, 1965), p. 54). For several years, however, he tended to continue his study of the laws of complementary colours and the scientific theories of the late 19th century, along the lines laid down by Seurat. Between 1907 and 1909 he painted numerous works in an increasingly refined technique and with a correspondingly reduced concern for the veristic rendering of the subject; his studies of light set him on the path of an advanced formal syntheticism.
Gino Severini: Dynamic Hieroglyphic of the Bal Tabarin, oil on…During these years in Paris, Severini frequented the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, where he became acquainted with actors, actresses and playwrights (see fig.). He met Félix Fénéon and the French poet Paul Fort (1872–1960), whose daughter Jeanne he married in 1913, and spent short periods with a friend in the countryside at Poitou. He took a studio in the Pigalle district, at the Impasse Guelma, where his neighbours included Braque, Suzanne Valadon and Maurice Utrillo. In early 1910 he received a letter from Boccioni inviting him to sign his name to the Manifesto dei pittori futuristi, which was issued as a pamphlet on 11 February 1910. The ideas and poetics of Futurism enabled him to broaden his vision and to explore a hitherto unknown field, that of the representation of speed and dynamism. Still taking his inspiration from the technique and colour analysis of Seurat’s painting, in 1910 Severini began to develop the energetic and vital charge of his chromatic juxtapositions.
In the paintings he completed in 1911, such as Black Cat (Ottawa, N.G.), The Boulevard (London, Mr and Mrs Eric Estorick priv. col.) and the Pan-Pan Dance in Monico (1909–11; destr. World War II; second version, 1960; Paris, Pompidou), Severini accentuated the rhythm created by the fragmentation of light, obtaining a spatial scansion increasingly based on geometric forms. Using colour to accentuate contrasts, he constructed a dynamic representation in which simultaneity is brought into relief by the musicality of the pictorial composition as a whole. While still adhering to the ideas of the Futurists, Severini developed a very personal technique. He maintained a privileged relationship with France, often acting as an intermediary between French cultural circles and his Italian friends. He signed the second manifesto of Futurist painting, La pittura futurista—Manifesto tecnico (11 April 1910), participated in the group’s exhibitions in the major European capitals and supported his friends in polemical controversies. After a short period in Italy, in the spring of 1913 he had a one-man exhibition in London at the Marlborough Gallery; this later transferred to the Sturm-Galerie in Berlin.
Gino Severini: Armoured Train, oil on canvas, 1159×886 mm, 1915…Severini’s painting became increasingly abstract during this period. He emphasized the formal stylization of luminous energy by choosing images of movement in space, such as ballerinas, as in Dynamic Hieroglyphic of the Bal Tabarin (1912; New York, MOMA), or trains and buses. In 1914 he wrote a manifesto, ‘Le analogie plastiche del dinamismo’, but it was not published until much later. He was in Rome at the outbreak of World War I in 1914, but he returned at once to Paris. In 1915 he exhibited with the Futurists in San Francisco, at the Panama–Pacific International Exposition. Meanwhile he began to take inspiration for his painting from the war (see fig.); the works became more solid and volumetric in treatment, as in Plastic Synthesis of the Idea ‘War’ (1915; Munich, Staatsgal. Mod. Kst).
2. Stylistic evolution, 1916–66.
A dramatic change of style occurred in Severini’s paintings in 1916. From the decomposition of volumes he progressed towards a formal purity inspired by the tradition of the Italian Renaissance. Maternity (1916; Cortona, Mus. Accad. Etrus.) is the most important painting of this period; it is the result of a new attention to the mathematical and compositional rules that involved him passionately for many years, leading him to publish Du Cubisme au classicisme (Paris, 1921). The book was much criticized by the Cubists. During the war he pursued his critical reflections on the relation of art and science to the ‘divisionism of form’ (‘Symbolisme plastique et symbolisme littéraire’, Mercure France, 1 Feb 1916) and espoused the rigorously constructive solutions of the Cubists, a direction he was taking in his own painting. His version of Cubism most closely resembled Synthetic Cubism, for example Bohémien jouant de l’accordéon (1919; Milan, Gal. A. Mod.). During these years Severini’s interest was focused on two ideas placed in a dialectical relationship: that of a return to the artist’s métier and to technique and that of an extension of constructive values of space through fragmentation and recomposition. In 1917 he was invited to exhibit his Futurist paintings at 291, the gallery run by Alfred Stieglitz in New York; the show was a great critical success. In 1918, when the war intensified, Severini was forced to leave Paris; he took refuge in Aix-les-Bains, near Chambéry, and then at Le Châtelard in the Savoy, where he painted numerous still-lifes and landscapes.
In 1919 Severini signed a three-year contract with the dealer Léonce Rosenberg (best-known for his association with the Cubists), whom he had met a few years before. Still attracted by the rational foundations of scientific studies, he extended his research on the theory of painting and architecture and also attended a series of lectures on mathematics. These interests led him to produce paintings constructed on precise geometrical lines, such as Still-life with Guitar (1919; Otterlo, Kröller-Müller Sticht.), which he showed in 1919 at the Galerie de l’Effort Moderne in Paris; this work was not well received by the critics. In the early 1920s he was commissioned to decorate a room at the home of the Sitwell family at Castello di Montegufoni, near Florence. His frescoes, completed in 1922 and painted according to what he referred to as ‘the aesthetic of compass and number’, included characters from the commedia dell’arte. This theme also became prominent in his easel paintings during the 1920s. This was the first of a long series of wall decorations painted under the stimulus of a rediscovered religious faith, strengthened by his friendship with the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain. From 1924 Severini worked in Switzerland on a cycle of murals in the church of Semsales in the canton of Friburg. In 1927–8 he also completed frescoes in the Baroque church at La Roche, near Aigle. In these decorations, still Cubist in spirit, he expressed his search for proportionality between subject and object ‘ordered in the context of a third term, which is the work’, according to the laws of ‘sensibility’ and ‘intelligence’.
During 1928–9 Severini spent about a year in Rome, where he came into contact with members of the Novecento Italiano. He participated with them in exhibitions abroad and painted decorative panels with images suggesting Roman ruins and masks for Rosenberg’s house in Paris. In the late 1920s and early 1930s he showed his paintings in numerous international retrospective exhibitions; he continued his work as a mural painter (church of Tavannes, Switzerland; mosaics in the churches of Tavannes, near Biel, and Friburg), and created illustrations for books by Paul Fort and Paul Valéry. In 1933, for the Fifth Triennale of Milan, he was commissioned to produce a mosaic for the reception hall of the new Palazzo della Triennale. In the same year he was commissioned to decorate the church of Notre Dame du Valentin in Lausanne.
Severini’s return to Italy in 1935 coincided with the heyday of the grand monumental enterprises initiated by the régime of Benito Mussolini (see Fascism). He participated in numerous projects, producing mosaics (1936) for the Palazzo di Giustizia in Milan, mosaics (1936) for the Palazzo delle Poste in Alessandria and mosaics and frescoes at the University of Padua in 1937. He was stimulated by the ideal, current in those years, of creating a new relationship between architecture and the visual arts. In the late 1930s he also created numerous sets and costumes for the theatre.
Severini again settled in Paris in 1946, and during this period he returned to a Neo-Cubist manner of painting. He also experimented with a stylized figuration reminiscent of the Futurist style of decomposition, both in easel paintings and in large decorative projects during the 1950s, notably for the Palazzo dei Congressi in Rome. In the following years he received numerous honours. After his death his remains were transferred from Paris to Cortona.
Ester Coen. "Severini, Gino." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T077858 (accessed April 12, 2012).
