Do you work in fashion and are finding it hard to come up with inspirations for your next collection? It is perfectlty understandable, after all we have left behind a painful year and we are just at the beginning of 2021 with new challenges awaiting us for what regards Coronavirus variants, anti-Covid vaccines being slow to come, new rules, restrictions and lockdowns. Yet, art remains a great way to get inspired, experiment with different techniques and stay focused.
The Internet provides us with plenty of materials to research even when museums are closed, so for today let's take as starting point "Femme lisante (Jeanne dans l'atelier)" (1916) by Gino Severini, currently on display at Palazzo Maffei-Casa Museo, in Verona, Italy.
In which ways can it inspire us? Well, in this painting of his wife Gino Severini got free grom Futurist rules and conventions and tried to make a synthesis between Braque and Picasso. So we could use as inspiration the main colours of Jeanne's dress – white, pale blues and different shades of grey – for the main palette of a collection, but the painting could be recreated also as a collage made with leftover scraps of fabrics appliqued on a shirt. Besides, the artwork could maybe prompt us to explore the life of Severini a bit more.
Born in Cortona in 1883, as a young man Severini moved to Rome where he met the painter Umberto Boccioni. The two friends joined Giacomo Balla's studio, where they were introduced to the technique of Divisionism, that is painting with adjacent rather than mixed colours and breaking the painted surface into a field of dots and stripes.
At the beginning of the 1900s Severini moved to Paris and created his first works dedicated to landscapes that showed a derivation from Seurat's Pointillisme. In 1909 Severini moved from Divisionism to Futurism: he supported Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's movement and signed the Manifesto of the Futurist Painters in February 1910 and the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting in April the same year, along with Balla, Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, and Luigi Russolo.
Severini produced around this time iconic works such as the "Souvenir de Voyage" (1911), a work of art in line with the theories featured in the technical manifesto of Futurist painting.
Yet Severini also brought some innovations and originality to this style, together with his personal points of view and perspectives.
The painter toned down indeed Marinetti's violence through his early influence by Sorel and tried to filter Futurism through his experiences and passions. His decomposition of forms also showed links with Robert Delaunay and Fernand Léger.
While for Marinetti the modern world was made of fast means of transport and industrial progress, Severini was less attracted to machines. For him modern life meant cafes, dancers and singers, and he often chose the form of the dancer to express Futurist theories of dynamism in art as proved by his works "Dynamism of a Dancer" or "Dancer at Pigalle" (both 1912). The latter is an oil painting on sculpted gesso on an artist's canvasboard decorated with sequins. Severini's Futurism was therefore softened, less technological maybe than Marinetti's and more focused on body movements rather than machines.
Some of Severini's works also retained a fashion component (his mother was a dressmaker and he must have been inspired by her as well), in his oil on canvas "La Modiste" (The Milliner, 1910-11) he paid indeed homage to a young hatmaker strolling in the street, recreating her portrait in perfect Futurist style with shifting planes of colours and fragmented and repeated elements of the hatmaker's figure that contribute to give a sense of motion and dynamism to the painting (the artwork was included in the first Futurist exhibition in Paris, held in February 1912).
After 1916 Severini also started using the collage technique filtering it through the Cubist point of view and allowed in this way his colleagues to discover Cubism. Severini gradually abandoned the Futurist style and painted in a synthetic Crystal Cubist style until 1920.
The artist then began to explore the possibilities offered by the classical balance based on the Golden Section in still lifes and figurative subjects, returning to a more conservative style of painting, still characterised by original motifs.
During this period he painted "Ritratto di Gina Severini (Mia Figlia)" (Portrait of Gina Severini (My daughter), 1934), inspired by Byzantine mosaics, but with a great attention to the dynamism offered by fashion and accessories (see the simple pearl earrings and the striped sleeveless top contrasting with the yellow cover of the book Gina is holding in her hands).
In the 1940s Severini's style became semi-abstract and in the '50s, he returned to the subjects of his Futurist years – dancers, light and movement.
There is a quote by Severini that may prove inspiring for creative minds working in fashion or interior design. "I should like my colours to be diamonds," he once stated "and to be able to use them abundandly so as to make my picture more dazzling with light and richness".
