Background
Gino Severini was born on April 7, 1883, in Cortona, Arezzo, Tuscany, Italy into a poor family. His father was a junior court official and his mother a dressmaker.
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Gino Severini was born on April 7, 1883, in Cortona, Arezzo, Tuscany, Italy into a poor family. His father was a junior court official and his mother a dressmaker.
Gino Severini 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. In 1899 he moved to Rome. There he attended art classes at the Villa Medici and by 1901 met Umberto Boccioni, who had also recently arrived in Rome and later would be one of the theoreticians of Futurism. Together, Severini and Boccioni visited the studio of Giacomo Balla, where they were introduced to painting with "divided" rather than mixed color. After settling in Paris in November 1906, Severini studied Impressionist painting and met the Neo-Impressionist Paul Signac.
Gino Severini was acquainted with the theories of divisionism when he himself arrived in Paris in 1906. There it was Georges Seurat, above all, who impressed Severini. In his studio at the Impass Guelma, Severini created his most famous futurist pictures, such as Le Boulevard (1909) and Danse du Pan Pan au Monico (1911). He was particularly attracted by subject matter connected with cabarets and night clubs, and his paintings represent hectic rhythms with dissected and multiplied forms, as in the Dynamic Hieroglyphic of the Bal Tabarin (1912).
In 1915 Severini joined the artists of the Effort Moderne. The experimental work produced in the style of the Section d'Or group led Severini into a transitional period, which he described in his book Du Cubisme au classicisme (1921).
In the 1920's he was drawn more to murals than to easel painting, creating a series of harlequins and frescoes, based on the commedia dell'arte, at the Castle of Montefugoni near Florence (1922). He also executed frescoes in Switzerland for churches at Semsales and La Roche (1926 - 1927), the Capuchin church at Sion, and Notre Dame du Valentin in Lausanne (1935). Severini designed mosaics for the University of Fribourg, Switzerland (ca. 1925), and for the Palace of Art (1933) and the Palace of Justice (1939) in Milan. Severini's development from a cubist to a neoclassicist style occurred under the influence of Pablo Picasso and the Valori Plastici group.
About 1930, however, Severini returned to a sort of decorative cubism. His late work showed a tendency toward concrete art. He died in Paris on February 26, 1966.
Gino Severini proposed a radical renovation of artistic activity in keeping with the dynamism of modern mechanized life. He was one of the five artists who signed the Futurist Manifesto in 1910, and he took part in the historic exhibitions of the futurist group in Paris, London, and Berlin.
Severini's pictures, painted in Seurat's clear colors, influenced the cubists to lighten their palette, and his personal contribution was to combine the futurist program with the analytical and geometrical spirit of cubism.
His works are in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery London, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art in Amsterdam, etc.
Waltz
Sea = Dancer
1914Visual Synthesis of the Idea: "War"
1914The bear dance at the Moulin Rouge
1913The Pan Pan at the Monico
1959Harlequins
1954Dancers
Self-portrait
Self-portrait
1908Dynamism of a dancer
1912Ballerina
1954Woman with Green Plant
1917Train of the Wounded
1913A dancer
Two Harlequins
Ballerina in Blue
1912Dancer + Sea + Equals Sailing Deck
Still Life
1955Ballerina - Bow - Sea
Mosaic at the Church of St. Mark, Cortona, Italy
Odalisque with Mirrors
1942Still Life
1916Harlequin
1965Memories of Travel
The Boulevard
1911Portrait of Madame M.S.
The Cyclist
1956Window with Doves
1931Plastic Rhythm of the 14th of July
1913Simultaniety of Centrifugal and Centripedal Groups (Woman at a Window)
1914Untitled
Armored Train in Action
1915Still Life with Violin
1964A dancer
1950A spring
1952Festival in Montmartre
Dancers at Monicos
1910Paris, The Seine, the Barges of the Louvre
1908On the Beach
1948Lancers
Still life
1949Maternity
1916The Concert
1955The musicians
1955Flowers and masks
1930North
The north-south
La Marchesa Maria De Seta
1937Red Cross Train Passing a Village
1915Still Life. Centrifugal Expansion of Colors.
1916Dancer + Sailing + Sea = Bouquet
Suburban Train Arriving in Paris
1915The Haunting Dancer
1911The Accordion Player
1919Still Life with Marsala Bottle
1917Still Life with the Dome of St. Peter's
1943Dancer in Pigalle
1912Commedia dell'Arte
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Quotations:
"One of the main causes of our artistic decline lies beyond doubt in the separation of art and science."
"Philosophers and aestheticians may offer elegant and profound definitions of art and beauty, but for the painter they are all summed up in the phrase: To create a harmony."
"In the early days the Cubism' method of grasping an object was to go round and round it. The Futurists declared that one had to get inside it. 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."
"Art is nothing but humanized science."
"I would like my colors to be diamonds and to be able to make abundant use of them in my pictures so as to make them gleam with light and richness."
