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.
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 was expelled from the entire Italian school system for the
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." 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. 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 analysing energy in paintings and expressing dynamism. Severini helped to organize the first Futurist exhibition outside Italy at Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris, in February 1912 and participated in subsequent Futurist shows in Europe and the United States. In 1913, he had solo exhibitions at the Marlborough Gallery, London, and Der Sturm, Berlin.
In 1916 Severini departed from Futurism and painted several
works in a naturalistic style inspired by his interest in early Renaissance
art.[3] After the First World War, Severini gradually abandoned the
Futurist style and painted in a synthetic Crystal Cubist style until 1920.[3][4] 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.Artwork description & Analysis: Inspired
by his voyage through coastal Anzio, Severini created this painting to draw a parallel between the sea and the human form. The figure is undistinguished from the water, becoming an inseparable component of the contiguous surroundings. Severini incorporates the Divisionist technique of stippled brushstrokes; flat planes and cylindrical shapes converge, shattering traditional approaches to
representing three-dimensional space.