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Lot Essay
This work is sold with a photo-certificate from Daniela Fonti.
Severini’s Natura Morta dates from late 1918, just weeks before the Armistice brought the Great War to an end, and at the height of his engagement with synthetic Cubism in its radically distilled late form. By the end of 1916, Severini had repudiated the Futurists’ concern with the dynamism and simultaneity of modern experience and had embraced the enduring still-life themes and comparatively stable, geometric structure of synthetic Cubism. “I, uneasy and dissatisfied with myself, put aside my dancers and started painting static things, deeming it undignified to facilitate my work with ‘subjects,’” Severini later explained in his autobiography. “In other words, I was striving for a dynamic art capable of reaching its maximum potential, but I also wanted to express a universal dynamism using any random subject and using only pictorial means, that is, through the use of lines and colors arranged in a certain order” (The Life of a Painter, Princeton, 1995, p. 165).
By late 1918, the vanguard of the new artistic order had coalesced around the dealer Léonce Rosenberg, and Severini allowed Rosenberg to mount a major show of his work in May 1919, the penultimate in a series of solo exhibitions that provided an astonishingly complete demonstration of Cubism’s continuing vigour. “[Severini’s] Cubism combined with that of Picasso, Laurens, Gris, Lipchitz, and Metzinger during the first six months of 1919 to give the impression that a single type of Cubist art had emerged from the War,” Christopher Green has explained (Cubism and Its Enemies, New Haven, 1987, p. 38).
The influence of Picasso’s earliest works of Synthetic Cubism upon the present lot is clear. The work shares its oval format, papier-collé elements and the fragments of the word ‘Journal’ with Picasso’s iconic Nature morte à la chaise cannée of the Spring of 1912, now in the collection of the Musée Picasso, Paris. In this collage Picasso had fixed different fragments of paper (including amongst others, newspaper and wallpaper) to the canvas to create one of the earliest examples of Synthetic Cubism. These papier-collé or collage experiments were soon absorbed into the art-historical narrative of Synthetic Cubism, a style which Severini was quick to adopt in the wake of his Futurist period.
In the present Natura morta, Severini has assembled a set of familiar still-life elements—a compotier of fruit, a bottle and a newspaper - on a background plane of highly schematised faux-bois that signifies a wooden tabletop. The three objects in this still-life are arranged in a stable pyramid, which is enlivened by the play of curves versus angles; the subdued palette of blue-gray tones gains richness through passages of ebullient patterning and contrasts of light against dark, while rich black accents anchor the three corners of the pyramidal armature. The more rational structure of Severini’s cubist still-lifes represents his personal contribution to the wartime and post-war rappel à l’ordre, as well as reflecting the artist’s own mounting interest in proportional systems. “I thought that geometry and mathematics should be used more precisely,” Severini explained, “that artists should apply, and would benefit from, strictly observed laws of geometry and mathematics” (ibid., p. 210).
Another, more practical, influence visible in the grey background and dotted elements of Natura Morta is Severini’s surroundings in Aix-les-Bains during the Summer and Autumn of 1918, where he was struck by a decorative element in his new home: ‘I had found the walls decorated with a special type of wallpaper that I enjoyed very much, giving me useful elements inspiring a few works. What had interested me the most of such wallpaper was the use, against a warm grey tone, of small black dots and white dots’ (translated from Italian, the artist quoted in D. Fonti, Gino Severini Catalogo ragionato, Milan, 1988, p. 36).
Severini’s Natura Morta dates from late 1918, just weeks before the Armistice brought the Great War to an end, and at the height of his engagement with synthetic Cubism in its radically distilled late form. By the end of 1916, Severini had repudiated the Futurists’ concern with the dynamism and simultaneity of modern experience and had embraced the enduring still-life themes and comparatively stable, geometric structure of synthetic Cubism. “I, uneasy and dissatisfied with myself, put aside my dancers and started painting static things, deeming it undignified to facilitate my work with ‘subjects,’” Severini later explained in his autobiography. “In other words, I was striving for a dynamic art capable of reaching its maximum potential, but I also wanted to express a universal dynamism using any random subject and using only pictorial means, that is, through the use of lines and colors arranged in a certain order” (The Life of a Painter, Princeton, 1995, p. 165).
By late 1918, the vanguard of the new artistic order had coalesced around the dealer Léonce Rosenberg, and Severini allowed Rosenberg to mount a major show of his work in May 1919, the penultimate in a series of solo exhibitions that provided an astonishingly complete demonstration of Cubism’s continuing vigour. “[Severini’s] Cubism combined with that of Picasso, Laurens, Gris, Lipchitz, and Metzinger during the first six months of 1919 to give the impression that a single type of Cubist art had emerged from the War,” Christopher Green has explained (Cubism and Its Enemies, New Haven, 1987, p. 38).
The influence of Picasso’s earliest works of Synthetic Cubism upon the present lot is clear. The work shares its oval format, papier-collé elements and the fragments of the word ‘Journal’ with Picasso’s iconic Nature morte à la chaise cannée of the Spring of 1912, now in the collection of the Musée Picasso, Paris. In this collage Picasso had fixed different fragments of paper (including amongst others, newspaper and wallpaper) to the canvas to create one of the earliest examples of Synthetic Cubism. These papier-collé or collage experiments were soon absorbed into the art-historical narrative of Synthetic Cubism, a style which Severini was quick to adopt in the wake of his Futurist period.
In the present Natura morta, Severini has assembled a set of familiar still-life elements—a compotier of fruit, a bottle and a newspaper - on a background plane of highly schematised faux-bois that signifies a wooden tabletop. The three objects in this still-life are arranged in a stable pyramid, which is enlivened by the play of curves versus angles; the subdued palette of blue-gray tones gains richness through passages of ebullient patterning and contrasts of light against dark, while rich black accents anchor the three corners of the pyramidal armature. The more rational structure of Severini’s cubist still-lifes represents his personal contribution to the wartime and post-war rappel à l’ordre, as well as reflecting the artist’s own mounting interest in proportional systems. “I thought that geometry and mathematics should be used more precisely,” Severini explained, “that artists should apply, and would benefit from, strictly observed laws of geometry and mathematics” (ibid., p. 210).
Another, more practical, influence visible in the grey background and dotted elements of Natura Morta is Severini’s surroundings in Aix-les-Bains during the Summer and Autumn of 1918, where he was struck by a decorative element in his new home: ‘I had found the walls decorated with a special type of wallpaper that I enjoyed very much, giving me useful elements inspiring a few works. What had interested me the most of such wallpaper was the use, against a warm grey tone, of small black dots and white dots’ (translated from Italian, the artist quoted in D. Fonti, Gino Severini Catalogo ragionato, Milan, 1988, p. 36).