“Futurism is a movement, and movement is life.”
~ Gino Severini, from his autobiography "The Life of a Painter".
| In his autobiography, Gino Severini writes that he first heard of Futurism around 1909 from his friend Umberto Boccioni, who wrote him an enthusiastic letter explaining his plan to create a new modern movement, a nationalistic vision for the rejuvenation and rebirth of Italy. Originally conceived by Marinetti, Futurism alluded to new conceptions of ethical, political, social and aesthetic ideals that were intended to reflect the changes of modern life in the new century. The Futurists sensed that modern man could not be accurately portrayed as divorced from his fast-paced leisure activities or his intensified psychological state. The group was primarily concerned with the concept of Dynamism: the subject and its environment interpreted together in motion through form and color. (Dancers appear frequently in Severini’s graphic works because he considered them an ideal subject for exploring the issues of dynamism.) In response to Boccioni’s letter, Severini decided to sign the Futurist Manifesto, which first appeared in 1909 in the French newspaper Le Figaro, written by the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, along with his artist friends, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Giacomo Balla and Luigi Russolo. By 1916 however, due to the fact that the movement was becoming progressively political, Severini broke off all contact with Marinetti, but not with the Futurist aesthetic.
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