The one Futurist who lived in Paris

Futurism (the loud, fast, machine-mad Italian art movement) was Italian. Its painters lived in Milan and Rome and Turin. Its founder banged the drum from Italy. And the one Futurist who painted the picture in front of you was living, the entire time, in Paris. His name was Gino Severini (1883–1966; pronounced “JEE-no seh-veh-REE-nee”), he was born in the Tuscan hill town of Cortona, and in November 1906, at twenty-three, he packed up and moved to France. He once said the two cities he felt most bound to were Cortona and Paris, and that he was born physically in the first and intellectually and spiritually in the second. Take him at his word, because it was Paris, not Italy, that taught his hand what to do.

Understand what he walked into. Paris in 1906 was the laboratory where modern painting was being invented, week by week, in a few cheap studios on the hill of Montmartre. Within a couple of years Severini knew, and drank with, more or less everyone who mattered: Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, the two young men who were taking the visible world apart and rebuilding it as faceted planes in the style soon called Cubism; the poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire, the movement’s loudest cheerleader; the painter Amedeo Modigliani. He had a studio in the same building cluster as Braque and the painter Suzanne Valadon. He was, in other words, a Parisian insider years before the Italian movement he would join even existed.

Then the movement found him. In February 1910 Severini co-signed the Manifesto of the Futurist Painters, and that April the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting (a manifesto being a public declaration in which a movement announces its program and picks its fights; Futurism announced itself in print before it had any paintings to show). He signed alongside four men working back in Italy: Giacomo Balla (who had been his teacher), Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà and Luigi Russolo. Futurism wanted to paint the modern world’s speed and energy: motorcars, electric light, the crowd, the machine, the city in motion. Its founder, the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, had launched it in 1909 with a manifesto that didn’t just love the racing car. It glorified war as “the world’s only hygiene,” sneered at museums as graveyards, and, in the same breath, professed “scorn for woman.” Hold those two things together, because they led somewhere dark and they bear on this very painting. The friendliest, most sequinned thing the movement ever made is a glittering picture of women, painted by a member of a movement whose founding text held women in contempt. We’ll come back to where that worship of violence led, because Severini went part of the way down the road himself.

Severini’s peculiar position, an Italian Futurist living among the French Cubists, made him the single most important bridge between the two movements, and the painting in front of you is what that bridge looks like in oil. Futurism supplied the ambition: paint motion, paint energy, dissolve the solid world into force. But it was Cubism, watched up close in Paris, that handed Severini the grammar to do it, the faceting that shatters a form into planes, and one trick in particular that you will see all over this canvas: collaging real words and letters into the picture, a device Picasso and Braque had just started using. In 1911 Severini helped bring his Italian colleagues to Paris to see Cubism for themselves. He was the connector.

And here is where he split from the rest of them. Boccioni and the Italians loved the machine, the engine, the girder, the speeding car, hard metal in motion. Severini, living in the city of cabarets, loved something softer and just as fast: the dancer. The body in a crowd, light breaking on a spinning gown, the blur of a quadrille, this was his way of painting energy, and it is a far warmer way than a steel chassis. So while his friends were painting factories rising and trains charging, Severini went, in his memory, back to a Paris dance hall. He went back to the Bal Tabarin.