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Orangerie Museum in Paris Presents Gino Severini Exhibition

The Orangerie Museum in Paris presents “Gino Severini (1883 – 1966): Futurist and Neoclassicist” on view through July 25th.


Gino Severini Red Cross Train Passing a Village (Train de la croix rouge traversant un village) Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

This is the first retrospective of the work of the Italian painter Gino Severini since that organised in 1967 at the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris. It brings together some 70 works from private collections, European and American museums including the Triton Foundation Netherlands, Peggy Guggenheim Collection Venice, Centre Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris, Estorick Collection in London, Thyssen Foundation in Madrid and MOMA, New York. As Severini said, “Cortona and Paris are the cities I am most bound to : I was physically born in the first, intellectually and spiritually in the second”, Paris is therefore a particularly fitting home for this retrospective.

Severini originally trained under pointillist painter Giacomo Balla and at first remained close to his style, with an emphasis on Luminist effects and the contrast of light and shade. He arrived in Paris in 1906 keen to find out more about the work of Seurat. In 1910, Raoul Dufy, who had the neighbouring studio, introduced him to scientific Divisionism. His urban views, painted in quite a free Pointillist style, are reminiscent of Signac but also seem quite close to the landscapes painted by Van Gogh in Paris in 1887 with their broken brushwork and lighter palette. His few pastel portraits are closer in style to Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec. He continued the Divisionist experiments in his early Futurist works by integrating coloured planes and adding sequins to his dancers. In 1911, Gino Severini joined the Futurist movement, having already signed the Manifesto in 1910. His large painting, The Dance of the Pan Pan at the Monico, was the highlight of the 1912 Futurist exhibition. He acted as mediator between the artists from Milan and those of the Parisian avant-garde, and joined the Futurists on their European tour. His preferred subjects at this time were crowds, urban scenes and places of entertainment, very different from the themes of his artist friends (The Boulevard, Estorick Collection, London). He also represented movement in his series of dancers produced in 1912-1913.

The Musée de l’Orangerie is an art gallery of impressionist and post-impressionist paintings located on the Place de la Concorde in Paris. It contains works by Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri Rousseau, Chaim Soutine, Alfred Sisley and Maurice Utrillo, among others. As its name suggests, the Orangerie Museum is housed in a former orangery, built in 1852 by architect Firmin Bourgeois and completed by his successor, Ludovico Visconti to house the orange trees of the Tuileries Gardens.

Musée de l’Orangerie
Jardin des Tuileries
75001 Paris
+ 33 (0)1 44 77 80 07
www.musee-orangerie.fr

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