Artist Birthday: Gino Severini

Gino Severini was a Futurist painter, writer, mosaicist and set designer. Severini took the Cubism-offshoot movement of Futurism into total abstraction. He exhausted his commitment to Futurism by the time of World War I (1914–1918), and to the French avant-garde's penchant for pictorial deconstruction. Interestingly, he shifted his interest to Neo-Classicism.

Artist birthday for 7 April: Gino Severini (1883–1966, Italy)

After meeting the leading members of the Futurism movement, Gina Severini's works rapidly adopted the style.

Gino Severini, Dynamic Rhythm of a Head in a Bus, 1912. Pastel, charcoal, and pencil on paper, 63.8 x 49 cm. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. © 2025 Gino Severini/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. (SI-523svars)

Severini signed the Futurist manifesto in 1910, and painted in the Futurist idiom until World War I (1914–1918). His works before the war had a Cubist bent already, and after the war Severini painted in a more strictly Cubist fashion. This was possibly due to his association with Cubist still life painter Juan Gris (1887–1927). In Dynamic Rhythm of a Head in a Bus, Severini aptly adapts Cubism to the Futurist ideology about the superiority of modern machines as artistic forms, and the vitality of city life, in this case, a city bus. Severini has tried to catch the wobbling action of people's heads in a moving vehicle with a repetition and fragmentation of forms. It is difficult to discern which lines in this composition represent the "lines of force" that was an important element of Futurism, being the visualization of lines of direction caused by moving objects. Of the many works Severini executed in his laudatory of the autobus, this work is perhaps the closest to pure abstraction.

The end of the 1800s was characterized by an overall skepticism about the rapid evolution of scientific discovery and industrialization in the West, because of the associated problems that came along with it: overcrowded cities, food shortages, poverty and crime. One result was art movements such as Symbolism, the Arts and Crafts movement, and Art Nouveau that looked to the art of the "good old days" (the Middle Ages and Renaissance) for inspiration.

Skepticism turned to optimism in the first two decades of the 1900s. For artists, originality, which had been valued in art since Romanticism evolved in the late 1700s, became an increasingly important aesthetic element for progressive artists in the first decades of the 1900s.

 In Italy, young intellectuals initiated a movement that would gradually encompass art called Futurism. The basic tenets of Futurism were the rejection of Italy's "stagnant" culture of the 1800s stuck in Neoclassicism and Renaissance ideals. Their revolutionary ideals were to smash the status quo completely and re-energize Italy through expanded industrialization in Italian cities and of Italian territory, and a rejection of any nostalgia and reverence for the past.

The Futurists saw war and the speed and dynamism of the machine as new standards of beauty. Extremely nationalistic, they advocated change, progress and the vitality of industry. These ideas were laid out in a manifesto by Filippo Marinetti (1876–1944) titled The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism (1909–1910).

Born in Cortona, Severini had an interest in art when he was young. Around 1900 he moved to Rome and took drawing classes at the Villa Medici. At that time he met Giacomo Balla (1871–1958) and Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916). Boccioni had studied in Paris. Like many Italian artists of the time, Balla and Boccioni were under the influence of Post-Impressionism in their painting.  Boccioni introduced Severini to Divisionism, the Pointillist technique of such French Post-Impressionists as Georges Seurat (1859–1891).