How can paintings capture movement? Italy’s Futurists, a tumultuous but influential art collective formed in Milan at the beginning of the 20th Century, went some way to answering this. But while the group was largely fixated with social upheaval and modern technological developments, its member Gino Severini preferred a very different, but no less dynamic subject: the dancer.
While many recognise the riotous style of Umberto Boccioni as the defining face of futurism, his fellow artists had unique focuses that make the movement hard to consolidate. Although Filippo Tommaso Marinetti founded the group with an incendiary vision that proposed a wholesale rejection of the past, the paintings themselves didn’t always reflect the revolutionary politics associated with their artists. For example, Giacomo Balla’s first Futurist works use run-of-the-mill subjects such as a girl, a violinist and a dachshund. It’s the way he captures several moments simultaneously, like a long exposure photograph, that is dynamic in the Futurist sense.
Gino Severini, though a key player in the Futurist’s popularity, could also be seen as an outlier to the movement. Though he could be described as a ‘fervent Italian nationalist’ he would distance himself from the Fascist politics that later brought the group notoriety. A native of Milan, he nonetheless honed his craft in Paris, at a moment when the Avant-Garde scene was exploding. It is the influence of the French capital that makes him so interesting.
There he combined his studies of Pointillism (creating textures with dots) and Divisionism (segmenting colours into groups), as well as Cubism, before being asked to join the Futurists in an official capacity in 1912. Though initially struggling in the city, Paris presented him with no end of sensory delights, and its nightclub dancers became a key motif for him.
An early example of this is his iconic The Dance of the Pan-Pan in Monaco (1909–1911). This lively scene, with its mosaic-like composition, at first feels overwhelming. Our attention is first drawn by the central ladies in the red dresses engaged in a drunken dance; behind them are obscured musicians in red dinner jackets. We can also spot two ladies enjoying themselves on the table behind. Another key figure is the man in the black jacket to the front left of the dancers. With his comparatively bland, faceless dance partner, he appears meek against the towering women in red. Other figures are harder to distinguish, and the painting becomes more abstract around its periphery. The partners on the left, for example, seemed to have collapsed on the floor in alcohol-soaked debauchery. Other details, like the small woman climbing up the staircase and the tables in the foreground are examples of Severini’s distinct use of perspective. Meanwhile, his technique of placing a light source at the top of the painting recalls his other Divisionist works, like The Milliner (1910–1911).
Dynamic Hieroglyphic of the Bal Tabarin (1912) is another great example of a club tableau. Like his later portraits or The Bear Dance at the Moulin Rouge (1913) or Dancer (1914–1915) this scene centres on a pair of cross-pollinating dancers, but here he uses more intricate geometric textures. This one’s notable for its collage of seemingly out-of-place images: an Arab man on a camel, a naked woman riding a pair of scissors, a bunting of flags and a cat’s face. Together with floating words (a Cubist technique), it feels like a fever dream with fragments of the unconscious.
In 1910 Severini signed the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting. Among several curious and slightly overdramatic declarations is the artistic pledge ‘That movement and light destroy the materiality of bodies.’ We can see the influence of this in his work onwards.
With Dynamism of a Dancer (1912), Severini signalled his adoption of the Futurist interests of forces and motion. A woman kicks her legs frantically, with such effort that the whole composition is fractured. Her rippling white dress is almost indistinguishable from the background behind it: the waves become harsh jagged lines, while her golden legs cut through it all, like highly efficient parts of a machine. Severini’s use of weight, speed and contrast give the sense that the spectator is not viewing a painting, but a performer kicking inches from their face.
Similarly, Blue Dancer (1912) captures a vibrant subject refracted, as if by a broken mirror. The sequined dress dominates the frame, feeling less like a textile than a force of nature. Severini, like the expressionist painter Wassily Kandinsky, believed in the synaesthetic qualities of colour, and for him blue captured the sensory essence of the dancer that inspired this painting. The use of perspective is also interesting: see the fiddler in the top-right corner, a comically diminutive figure.
Dancer at Piggale’s (1912) takes the abstraction further. Filtering the scene through pinks and reds, Severini presents a dancer exploding in all directions: the hem of her dress encircling her like an aura; spotlights striking through her (or emanating from her?). Everything, the stage and the music, is being swallowed by her dress.
Looking at Severini’s output over 1909–1915, a period of experimentation inspired by his involvement in the artistic circles of Montmartre, there is a visible shift away from environments towards singular, elemental objects. This was part of a conscious effort to move away from representing the aesthetic qualities of dance, towards capturing its rhythmic essence.
His 1914 painting Sea = Dancer, goes further. Inspired by a retreat to the coastal town of Anzio in Italy, this dancer is, as the title suggests, completely infused with the sea. But the result looks like neither: what we get is a series of overlapping round shapes that evoke both the movements of the performer and the rushing waves. The vivid use of colours and Pointillist textures depict the sequined figure immersed in an environment of light and sound. The synthesis is so powerful that the colours burst outside the frame.
It was then that Severini began describing his art using the term ‘plastic analogies’. The idea behind this was that the artist could communicate sensory information to the spectator without painting things literally. The figure of the dancer was so important to Severini because it seemed to transcend materiality and would, as we have seen, become synonymous with his representations of nature. He may well have taken the word dancer to be a universal descriptor of vitality. While Severini would experiment with a range of styles and subjects throughout his life, and produced war art to rival Boccioni, his most memorable pieces are charged with this sense of rhythm.
