Gino Severini ( April 7 1883 – February
26 1966) was an Italian painter and a leading member of the Futurist movement. 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.
He was invited by Filippo Tommaso
Marinetti and Boccioni to join the Futurist movement and was a co-signatory,
with Balla, Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, and Luigi Russolo, of the Manifesto of the
Futurist Painters in February 1910 and the Technical Manifesto of Futurist
Painting in April the same year.
He was an important link between
artists in France and Italy and came into contact with Cubism before his
Futurist colleagues. Following a visit to Paris in 1911, the Italian Futurists
adopted a sort of Cubism, which gave them a means of analyzing energy in
paintings and expressing dynamism.
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. In the 1940s Severini's style became
semi-abstract. In the 1950s he returned to his Futurist subjects: dancers,
light and movement.
