Gino Severini (Cortona 1883-Parigi 1966)

In 1901, at the age of eighteen, he moved to Rome where he met Giacomo Balla, who introduced him to Divisionist painting and brought him into contact with Umberto Boccioni. He delved into this style in 1906, when he moved to Paris and met many of the leading exponents of the artistic avant-garde in the French capital. Despite his distance from Italy, after joining the Futurist Movement, in 1910 he signed the Manifesto of Futurist Painting together with Balla, Boccioni, Carrà and Russolo. In 1912, he invited Boccioni and Carrà to join him in Paris, where he organized the first exhibition of the Futurists. He arrived at a kaleidoscopic vision in which space and time, present and past, together and particular come together in a feast of light and color. From 1924 to 1934, partly as a result of a religious crisis, he devoted himself to sacred art, creating large frescoes and mosaics mainly for Swiss churches. After World War II, reinterpreting his Futurist works in the vein of abstract decorativism, he rediscovered his happiest vein.