Gino Severini
Gino Severini was an Italian painter. When he arrived in Rome in search of fortune, he met Umberto Boccioni there: with him he began to frequent the studio of Giacomo Balla, from whom he learned the Divisionist technique by painting oils and pastels in the countryside and in the Roman suburbs. In 1906 he left for Paris, which became, despite his long stays in Italy, his chosen homeland. He deepened the research of him, starting from a naturalistic pointillism, with the study
of the impressionists and post-impressionism by Georges Seurat (The donut seller, 1908, Paris, Coll. Severini). On the basis of the chromatic decomposition, in 1910 he joined futurism, developing an expressive solution that proposed an original, non-eclectic syncretism of various avant-garde instances (Fanciulla + strada + atmosphere, 1913, Rome, Gall. Naz. D'Arte Mod. ). Thus Severini, a futurist, was able to look at orphism, and later, as a synthetic cubist, collaborate with De Stijl. At the first Parisian exhibition at Bernheim jr. (1912) Severini exhibited the Boulevard (1910, London, E. Estorick Coll.) And the Danza del Pan-Pan al Monico (destroyed in a fire and remade by the painter in 1959). In the following months he painted the Blue Dancer (1912, Milan, Coll. R. Jucker) and Spherical Expansion of Light (centrifugal) (1914, Milan, Coll. R. Jucker), then moving on to freer techniques: collage, words painted (The armored train, 1915, New York, Zeisler Coll.). Severini was one of the artists who heralded the return to classicism of the 1920s (Maternity, 1916, Mus. Comunale di Cortona), he sought an approach to the Italian twentieth century (Natura morta, 1929, Rome, Gall. Naz. D'Arte Mod.) , but this does not mean he denied the lesson of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. Towards the forties he returned to a painting of neo-Cubist origin and open to the instances of geometric abstractionism. He also created sculptures: metal tops with steel gears and springs. It is also worth mentioning his essay work: Reasonings on the figurative arts (1936).
