Gino Severini

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 and a group of classmates were expelled from the entire Italian school system for the attempted 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."

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 adjacent rather than mixed colours 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."

Crystal Cubism and Neo-classicism In 1916, Severini departed from Futurism and painted several works in a naturalistic style inspired by his interest in early Renaissance art. After the First World War, Severini gradually abandoned the Futurist style and painted in a synthetic Crystal Cubist style until 1920. By 1920, he was applying theories of classical balance based on the Golden Section to still lifes and figurative subjects from the traditional commedia dell'arte. He became part of the "return to order" in the arts in the post-war era. Works such as The Two Pulchinellas (1922) exemplify Severini's turn toward a more conservative, analytic type of painting, which nonetheless suggests metaphysical overtones. The murals were completed in 1922.

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 Quadrennial, and was given a solo exhibition at the Accademia di San Luca.

Throughout his career, he published important theoretical essays and books on art. In 1946, he published an autobiography, The Life of a Painter.

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

Gallery

Public collections Among the public collections holding works by Gino Severini are: Museum de Fundatie, Zwolle, Netherland Guggenheim Museum, New York Museum of Modern Art, New York