Gino Severini

Severini studied in Cortona until the age of 15 when, because of a prank, he was expelled from all Italian schools. In 1899 he moved with his mother to Rome, where he worked as an accountant for a pipe-maker and later for an export agency. His passion for art led him to attend an evening class in drawing at a school known as ‘Gli incurabili’, and in the morning he studied perspective. Together with a group of friends that included Umberto Boccioni, whom he met in 1901, he was introduced to the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, the Russian novelists and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and to the general principles of Marxism. With Boccioni he often visited the studio of Giacomo Balla, who had recently returned from Paris, and learnt from him the technique of Divisionism.

Severini’s first oil paintings reflect a teaching that concentrated on the values of light and the perspective solutions of the overall composition. His early rural landscapes were still dominated by a strongly realistic approach, though they were without chiaroscuro or tonal effects; a few of them were exhibited at the annual exhibition in Rome of the Amatori e Cultori in 1903 and 1904. After a brief period in Florence, where he painted some copies of works in the Uffizi on commission, he returned to Rome and contributed some portraits in a populist mode for covers of the Sunday edition of the Socialist newspaper Avanti.

In the autumn of 1906, by now disappointed with the provincial and academic climate of the Italian capital, Severini left for Paris. After the first difficult and poverty-stricken months, he came into contact with the intellectual world of writers and artists gravitating around the Montmartre district and became acquainted with Modigliani, Maurice Raynal, Picasso, Gris, Braque and Max Jacob. He was particularly struck by the Impressionist paintings displayed at the Musée du Luxembourg. Now he became fully aware of the importance of Balla’s teaching and of the need to break away completely from an excessively naturalistic approach. With regard to his experience in Paris, Severini later wrote: ‘Now people spoke of rhythm, volume and three-dimensional space in bodies; they spoke of colour and design for their own sake, not in relation to real things’.  For several years, however, he tended to continue his study of the laws of complementary colours and the scientific theories of the late 19th century, along the lines laid down by Seurat. Between 1907 and 1909 he painted numerous works in an increasingly refined technique and with a correspondingly reduced concern for the veristic rendering of the subject; his studies of light set him on the path of an advanced formal syntheticism.