SEVERINI, GINO

born April 7, 1883, Cortona, Italy died Feb. 27, 1966, Paris, France painter whose synthesis of the styles of Futurism and Cubism was instrumental in gaining acceptance for the Futurist movement outside Italy. Severini began his painting career in 1900 as a student of Giacomo Balla, an Italian Pointillist who later became a prominent Futurist. Stimulated by Balla's account of the new painting in France, he moved to Paris in 1906 and met leading members of the French avant-garde, such as the Cubist painters Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso and the writer Guillaume Apollinaire. He continued to work in the Pointillist manner, however, until 1910, when he signed the Futurist painters' manifesto. Although he paid lip service to the official aesthetics of Futurism, Severini used the human figure as the source of the imagery and tempo in his paintings. He was especially fond of painting nightclub scenes in which he evoked the sensations of movement and sound by filling the picture with rhythmic forms and cheerful, flickering colours. Dynamic Hieroglyph of the Bal Tabarin (1912; Museum of Modern Art, New York City), continued the theme of nightlife but incorporated the Cubist technique of collage (real sequins are fixed to the dancers' dresses) and such nonsensical elements as a realistic nude riding a pair of scissors. Only briefly, in such wartime works as Red Cross Train (1914; Guggenheim Museum, New York City), did Severini display the orthodox Futurists' glorification of war and mechanized power. Instead, he turned increasingly to an idiosyncratic form of Cubism that, nevertheless, retained decorative elements of Pointillism and Futurism, as is seen in Spherical Expansion of Light (Centrifugal) (1914). But in 1921 he adopted the Neoclassical figurative style that he retained throughout the remainder of his career in many decorative panels and mosaics.