Gino Severini: a synthesis of futurism and cubism

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Gino Severini (April 7, 1883, Cortona, Italy - February 27, 1966, Paris, France) is a famous Italian artist. He began his work with pointillism (divisionism). In the future, he was able to synthesize such styles as futurism and cubism. He is the author of several books.

Biography

His father was a junior court official and his mother was a dressmaker. For some time he attended school in Cortona. At fifteen, he was expelled from the school system for stealing exam papers. For some time he worked with his father. In 1899 he moved to Rome with his mother. It was there that he first became seriously interested in art, painting in his spare time while working as a shipping clerk. Thanks to the help of his patron, his countryman, he attended art classes, entered a free school belonging to the Rome Institute of Fine Arts, and later became a student at a private academy. His formal art education ended two years later when his patron stopped paying his allowance.

Becoming an artist

Severini began his painting career in 1900 as a student of Giacomo Balla, an Italian pointillist painter who later became a prominent futurist. Together they visited the workshop of Giacomo Balla, where they were introduced to the divisionist technique, painting with divided rather than mixed color, and breaking up the painted surface into dots and stripes. Encouraged by Balla's account of a new direction in France, Gino moved to Paris in 1906 and met with the leading representatives of the French avant-garde, the cubist painters Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso and the writer Guillaume Apollinaire. The sale of his work did not provide enough money to live on, and he depended on the generosity of patrons.

Gino Severini continued to work in a pointillist manner, which involved the use of dots of contrasting colors in accordance with the principles of optical science. He followed this trend until 1910, before signing the Futurist Artists Manifesto.

Futurism by Gino Severini

At the invitation of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Boccioni, he joined the Futurist movement. As a result, in February 1910, these three artists, as well as Ballo, Carlo Carro and Luigi Russolo, signed the Manifesto of Futurist Artists, and then, two months later, the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting. After the Italian Futurists visited Paris in 1911, they began to use cubism, which made it possible to analyze the energy in paintings and expressdynamism.

Representatives of this trend wanted to revive Italian art (and, as a result, all Italian culture), depicting the speed and dynamism of modern life. Gino Severini shared this artistic interest, but his work lacked the political overtones characteristic of Futurism.

Creativity

While his colleagues usually painted moving cars or cars, he himself usually depicted the human figure as a source of energetic movement in his paintings. He was particularly fond of painting nightclub scenes, evoking sensations of movement and sound in the viewer, filling the picture with rhythmic forms and cheerful, shimmering colors. Gino Severini's The Dynamic Hieroglyph of the Tabarin Ball (1912) retained the theme of nightlife, but incorporated the Cubist collage technique (real sequins were attached to the dancers' dresses) and nonsensical elements such as a realistic nude figure on scissors.

In wartime works such as Red Cross Train Passing Through a Village (1914), Severini painted subjects befitting the futurists' glorification of war and mechanized power. Over the next few years, he increasingly turned to a peculiar form of cubism, which retained the decorative elements of pointillism and futurism.

Around 1916, Severini began to take a more rigorous and formal approach to composition; instead of deconstructing forms, he wanted to bring geometric order to his paintings. His works of this period represented, inmainly still lifes, made in the style of synthetic cubism, which entailed the creation of a composition from fragments of objects. In portraits such as Motherhood (1916), he also began to experiment with a neoclassical figurative style, a conservative approach that he would use more fully in the 1920s. Severini published From Cubism to Classicism (1921) in which he presented his theories about the rules of composition and proportion. Later in his career he created many decorative panels, frescoes and mosaics, and he became involved in sets and scenery for the theatre. The artist's autobiography "The Life of an Artist" was published in 1946.

In addition to the already named works, you can also present other paintings by Gino Severini with titles: Commedia dell'Arte, "Musicians", "Concert", "Harlequins", "Spring", "Dancers" and others.

Vernissages

Severini helped organize the first Futurist exhibition at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris (February 1912), his work was exhibited in subsequent Futurist exhibitions in Europe and the United States. In 1913 he held solo exhibitions at the Marlborough Gallery in London and in Berlin. In his autobiography, which was written much later, he noted the satisfaction of the Futurists from the reaction to the exhibition in Paris, but influential critics, in particular Apollinaire, ridiculed them for their pretense, ignorance of the mainstream of modern art and their provincialism. Severini later agreed with Apollinaire.