Gino Severini

“Gino Severini and the Symbolist Aesthetics of his Futurist Dance Imagery, 1910-1915, by Shannon N. Pritchard (Athens, Georgia, 2003; thesis, final draft)”

“66 images of Severini's painting art, on Wikiart”

“Whereas Boccioni's [painting of 1911] The Farewells portrays the ways in which strong sensations register as memory images, so that past and present are linked in a single 'durée', Severini's painting ['Memories of a Voyage'] destroys all semblance of spatio-temporal continuity.”

“The artist intended the painting ['Memories of a Voyage', Severini painted in 1910-11] to signal his 'ambition to surpass Impressionism, destroying the subject's unity of time and place' Instead of portraying an object in its immediate environment, Severini sought to render its relations to 'things that apparently had nothing to do with it.. [time and place]'”

“In 1913 Severini began work on a series of images exploring popular dances such as the 'Bear Dance' and the Argentine Tango. In contrast to his earlier paintings and the abstracted analogies that follow, where the representation of the artist's state of mind is a priority, these works emphasized the evocative power of strong color and simplified form. American 'animal' dances and the Latin based tango were introduced to Paris by 1911 through, among others, the music of Irving Berlin and the popular dance couple 'Vernon and Irene Castle'.”

“..the most important work ['Pan Pan'] yet painted by a futurist. Movement is well rendered in this canvas, and since no optical fusion of colors occurs, everything is in motion, as the artist wished.”

“Futurism and Cubism are comparable in importance tot the invention of perspective, for which they substituted a new concept op space. All subsequent movements were latent in them or brought about by them.. ..the two movements cannot be regarded as in opposition to each other, even though they started from opposite points; I maintain (an idea approved by Apollinaire and later by Matisse) that they are two extremes of the same sign, tending to coincide at certain points which only the poetic instinct of the painter can discover: poetry being the content and raison d'être of art.”

“It should also be born in mind that the research on 'movement' and the dynamic outlook on the world, which were the basis of Futurist theory, in no way required one to paint nothing but speeding cars or ballerinas in action; for a person who is seated, or an inanimate object, though apparently static, could be considered dynamically and suggest dynamic forms. I may mention as an example [his paintings] the 'Portrait of Madame S.' (1912) and the 'Seated Woman' (1914).”

“The intellectual abstraction of the second period of Cubism was of great importance, however. By its aspirations to the eternal and its 'concept of proportion inspired by the Classics' it revived the sense of craftsmanship concept in many painters. And this perfectly coincided with another of my ambitions – which was to make, with paint, an object having the same perfection of craftsmanship that a cabinet-maker would put into a piece of furniture.”

“In the early days the Cubists' method of grasping an object was to go round and round it; the futurists declared that one had to get inside it. In my opinion the two views can be reconciled in a poetic cognition of the world. But to the very fact that they appealed to the creative depths in the painter by awakening in him hidden forces which were intuitive and vitalizing, the Futurist theories did more than the Cubist principles to open up unexplored and boundless horizons.”

“..since then I have found consolation in Blake; 'Without Contraries is no progression', he says in his Proverbs of Hell. And Baudelaire's idea that 'Variety is an essential condition of life' seems to me to be in perfect accord with my aspirations and with my intention, as a Futurist painter, to put life in the place occupied by reasoning in the art of the Cubist period.”

“Before my encounter with Thomist philosophy through Maritain, I had almost reached the same conclusions through the logical development of my work, intuition and thought, but what a great sense of joy I felt upon discovering, in Maritain, the confirmation of certain thought patterns, certain ways of clarifying these to myself and to others.”

“..[a] generous display of scantily clad beauties and a carnavalesque inventiveness.. ..[the] beautifully masked and under-dressed women, with showers of confetti, multicolored streamers. The atmosphere was one of frenzy..”

“I was interested in achieving a creative freedom, a style that I could express with Seurat's.. ..color technique [color-divisionism], but shaped to my own needs. Proof that I found it is in my paintings of that period, among which is the famous 'Pan-Pan a Monico' [Severini painted in 1912]. My preference for Neo-Impressionism dates from those works. At times I tried to suppress it, but it always worked its way back to the surface.”

“[Severini characterized his approach to the importance of Divisionism for Futurism as] ..a consequence of Neo-Impressionism (Seurat, Signac) and Van Gogh, Toulouse Lautrec, Degas.. [compared to that of his Milanese colleagues who works were] influenced by Jugendstil [and] a continuation of the Lombardian tradition of Segantini, Previati..”

“..it was Seurat who first and most successfully established a balance between subject, composition and technique .. ..the modern world that Seurat wished to paint.. .I understood his importance as soon as I arrived in Paris [1906].. .I chose Seurat as my master for once and for all.”

“Philosophers and aestheticians may offer elegant and profound definitions of art and beauty, but for the painter they are all summed up in this phrase: To create a harmony”

“Art is nothing but humanized science.”

“In our young days, when Modigliani and I first came to Paris, in 1906, nobody was very clear about ideas. But unconsciously, we knew quite a lot of things, of which we became aware later on.”

“..ambition to surpass Impressionism, destroying the subject's unity of time and place.. ..[to render its relations to] things that apparently had nothing to do with it, but that in reality were linked to it in my imagination, in my memories or by feeling. In the same canvas I brought together the Arc of Triumph, the Tour Eiffel, the Alps, the head of my father, an autobus, the municipal hall of Pienza, the boulevard...”