Gino Severini (April 7, 1883, Cortona, Italy - February 27, 1966, Paris, France) - a famous Italian artist. He began his work with pointillism (divisionism). Later he was able to synthesize styles such as futurism and cubism. He is the author of several books.
Biography
His father served as a junior judicial officer, and his mother worked as a dressmaker. For some time he went to school in Corton. At the age of 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, working as a shipping clerk. Thanks to the help of a patron, his fellow countryman, he attended art classes, enrolled in a free school belonging to the Roman 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 benefits.
Becoming an artist
Severini began his career as a painter in 1900 as a student of Giacomo Balla, an Italian pointillist painter who later became an outstanding futurist. Together they visited the workshop of Giacomo Balla, where they got acquainted with the technique of divisionism, painting with divided rather than mixed colors, and breaking the painted surface into dots and stripes. Encouraged by Balla's story about a new direction in France, Gino moved to Paris in 1906 and met with leading representatives of the French avant-garde, cubist artists Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso and writer Guillaume Apollinaire. The sale of his works did not provide enough money for life, and he depended on the generosity of the patrons.
Gino Severini continued to work in a pointillist manner, which implied the use of dots of contrasting colors in accordance with the principles of optical science. He adhered to this trend until 1910, before the signing of the manifesto of futurist artists.
Futurism Gino Severini
At the invitation of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Boccioni, he joined the futuristic 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, and the Technical Manifesto of Futuristic Painting. After the Italian futurists visited Paris in 1911, they began to use cubism, which made it possible to analyze energy in paintings and express dynamism.
Representatives of this direction wanted to revive Italian art (and, as a result, the entire Italian culture), depicting the speed and dynamism of modern life. Gino Severini shared this artistic interest, but in his works there was no political context characteristic of futurism.
Creation
While his colleagues usually drew moving cars or cars, he himself usually depicted a human figure as a source of energetic movement in his paintings. He especially liked to paint nightclub scenes, causing the viewer to feel movement and sound, filling the picture with rhythmic forms and cheerful, flickering colors. Gino Severini's “Dynamic Character of the Ball Tabaren” (1912) preserved the theme of nightlife, but he included the Cubist collage technique (real sequins were attached to the dresses of the dancers) and such meaningless elements as a realistic nude on scissors.
In wartime works, such as The Red Cross Train Passing Through the Village (1914), Severini painted objects corresponding to the glorification of the futurists of war and mechanized power. Over the next few years, he increasingly turned to a peculiar form of cubism, in which the decorative elements of pointillism and futurism were preserved.
Around 1916, Severini began to use a more rigorous and formal approach to composition; instead of deconstructing forms, he wanted to restore geometric order in his paintings. His works of this period were mainly represented by 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 experimenting with a neoclassical imaginative style, a conservative approach that he more fully used in the 1920s. Severini published the book "From Cubism to Classicism" (1921), in which he presented his theories about the rules of composition and proportions. Later in his career, he created many decorative panels, frescoes and mosaics, and he began to participate in the scenery and scenery for the theater. The artist’s autobiography, The Artist’s Life, was published in 1946.
In addition to the already mentioned works, one can also present other paintings by Gino Severini with the names: Commedia dell'Arte, “Musicians”, “Concert”, “Harlequins”, “Spring”, “Dancers” and others.
Opening days
Severini participated in organizing the first Futurist exhibition at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, in Paris (February 1912), and 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 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 main directions of modern art and their provincialism. Severini later agreed with Apollinaire.