Gino Severini

Bio

One of the founders of the Futurist movement, a uniquely Italian response to the cubists. As a young artist from the provinces he traveled first to Rome where he studied at the French Academy in the Villa Medici, and met Boccioni and Balla, with whom he was later to found the futurist movement. Their first influence, however, was the divisionist legacy of Seurat, which had already been adapted by two slightly older painters, Morbelli and Pellizi di Volpedo. In 1906 Severini left for Paris to study Seurat at first hand, and over the next four years became friendly with other artistic radials, including Braque, Modigliani and Picasso. The first futurist manifesto, written by the enormously wealthy but eccentric writer, Filippo Marinetti (later a sympathizer with Mussolini’s fascism, which he felt marked the political manifestation of the artistic movement he invented), dates from 1909, but it was that of 1913 which truly expressed the aims and desires of these painters, which included not only artistic techniques but modes of living, political outlook and attitudes to women.