23 Facts About Gino Severini

Gino Severini was an Italian painter and a leading member of the Futurist movement.

Gino Severini was associated with neo-classicism and the "return to order" in the decade after the First World War.

Gino Severini showed his work at major exhibitions, including the Rome Quadrennial, and won art prizes from major institutions.

Gino Severini's father was a junior court official and his mother a dressmaker.

Gino Severini studied at the Scuola Tecnica in Cortona until the age of fifteen, when he and a group of fellow-classmates were expelled from the entire Italian school system for the attempted theft of exam papers.

Gino Severini knew most of the Parisian avant-garde, including Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Juan Gris, Pablo Picasso, Lugne-Poe and his theatrical circle, the poets Guillaume Apollinaire, Paul Fort, Max Jacob, and author Jules Romains.

Gino Severini was invited by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Boccioni to join the Futurist movement and was a co-signatory, with Balla, Boccioni, Carlo Carra, 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.

Gino Severini was an important link between artists in France and Italy and came into contact with Cubism before his Futurist colleagues.

Gino 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.

Gino Severini was less attracted to the subject of the machine than his fellow Futurists and frequently chose the form of the dancer to express Futurist theories of dynamism in art.

Gino Severini was particularly adept at rendering lively urban scenes, for example in Dynamic Hieroglyph of the Bal Tabarin and The Boulevard.

Gino Severini spent part of the war in Barcelona, but returned to Paris by July 1915.

In 1916 Gino Severini departed from Futurism and painted several works in a naturalistic style inspired by his interest in early Renaissance art.

Gino Severini became part of the "return to order" in the arts in the post-war era.

Works such as The Two Pulchinellas exemplify Gino Severini's turn toward a more conservative, analytic type of painting, which nonetheless suggests metaphysical overtones.

In 1921, he was commissioned by George Sitwell to paint murals for Montefugoni castle, which the latter had bought in 1909; the same year, Gino Severini published Du cubisme au classicisme: Esthetique du compas et du nombre, a book summarizing his research into mathematical theories of harmony and proportion.

Gino Severini exhibited in Milan with artists of the Novecento Italiano group in 1926 and 1929 and in their Geneva exhibition of 1929.

Gino Severini contributed a cycle of works to the Paris Exhibition.

Gino Severini explored fresco and mosaic techniques and executed murals in various media in Switzerland, France, and Italy.

Gino Severini executed commissions for the church of Saint-Pierre in Freiburg and inaugurated the Consegna delle Chiavi mosaic.

Gino Severini's mosaics were shown at the Cahiers d'Art gallery in Paris and he participated in a conference on the history of mosaic at Ravenna.

Gino Severini was awarded the Premio Nazionale di Pittura of the Accademia di San Luca in Rome, exhibited at the 9th Rome Quadrennal and was given a solo exhibition at the Accademia di San Luca.

Gino Severini died in Paris on 26 February 1966, aged 82.