Gino Severini Quotes

..the gesture that we want.. ..will be the dynamic sensation itself.

..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.

..displacement of bodies in [the] atmosphere [where] two persons form but one plastic unity, rhythmically balanced.

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.

[..that the execution of 'Pan Pan'] was influenced by the sounds of the ambiance [and the painting].. ..was only musical, to the detriment of the volumes and the forms that I had unconsciously neglected.. ..[in] following the greater emotional cause: the sounds.

It was during the first years [1906-1910] that we [the Futurist artists] realized the presence of a dualism deep down within us, where another person, whom we ourselves do not know, tends, at the moment of the creative act, to supplant the person we believe ourselves to be and would like to be. It is difficult to bring these two individualities into accord, yet it is upon this accord that the development of a personality largely depends. My first contact with the art of Seurat whom I adopted, once and for all, as my master, did a great deal to help me to express myself in terms of the two simultaneous and often opposed aspirations. This opposition caused me much mental torture, I must admit..

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 sea dancing, it's zig-zag movements and contrasting silver and emerald, evokes within my plastic sensibility the distant vision of a dancer covered in a sparkling sequins in her world of light, noise and sound. Therefore 'Sea = dancer' [= title of a painting he made in 1914]

I found in your book the confirmation of my ultimate conclusions and the tools for deepening this aspect of the artistic problem.

Original in Italian: ho trovato nel vostro libro la conferma delle mie ultime conclusioni e gli strumenti per approfondire questo as petto della questione artistica.

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

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.

[the] circular rhythmic movement of a dancer, the folds of whose dress are held out by means of a hoop. These folds preserve their exterior form, modified in a uniform manner through the rotary movement. In order the better to convey the notion of relief, I have attempted to model the essential portions in a manner almost sculptural. Light and ambiance act simultaneously on the forms in movement.

The need for abstraction and symbols is a characteristic sign of the intensity and rapidity with which life is lived today. It often happens that a word, [or] a phrase, will serve to synthesize a complete action, an entire psychology. In the same way, one gesture, one essential feature, may, by suddenly throwing light upon our intuition, succeed in presenting to our vision the total reality.

[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..