Collection: Gino Severini

(Cortona 1883 - Paris 1966)

Gino Severini, an Italian painter active for most of his life in Paris, was among the signatories of the Futurist Painting Manifesto of 1910 and the most Parisian of the Futurists: having moved to France in 1906, he became the natural intermediary between Italian research and French avant-gardes, from the Cubism of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque to the circle of Guillaume Apollinaire. Following the Futurist canvases dedicated to dance and the light of the modern city, in the 1920s, he embraced the “return to order”: a reflection on craftsmanship and measure, theorized in the essay Du Cubisme au Classicisme (1921), which led him to the masks of commedia dell'arte, still lifes, and an intense activity as a mural decorator, with cycles of mosaics and frescoes for the Swiss churches of Semsales and La Roche and for Saint-Pierre in Fribourg.
Alongside painting, Severini continuously cultivated graphic work – lithographs, etchings, pochoirs – cataloged by Francesco Meloni in the volume Gino Severini: all the graphic work. In the post-war period, returning to a language of Cubist descent, he particularly focused on original lithography, revisiting themes from throughout his career: dance, masks, still lifes with musical instruments, constructed with geometric planes and clear color fields. An independent production from painting, conducted with the same compositional rigor, and today one of the most accessible ways to approach his work.