Gino Severini. The Dance, 1909-1916
May 26 - October 28, 2001
Press Conferences: Thursday May 10; Rome, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Multimedia Lounge, 12.00 am, at the occasion of the presentation of the exhibit “Futurism 1909-1944”, from July 7 until October 22 at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome
Friday May 25; Venice, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, 12 am; panel: Daniela Fonti (curator), Philip Rylands, Director Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Romana Severini, Marco J. Netzer (Presidente della Direzione Generale, Banca del Gottardo)
Press Preview: Friday May 25, from 10 am until 2 pm
From 26th May to 28th October 2001, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection presents the exhibition Gino Severini. The Dance, 1909-1916. This takes place half a century after the 25th Venice Biennale of Visual Arts in 1950 paid tribute to Severini and rediscovered in his work the Futurist movement lead by F.T. Marinetti.
This unique exhibition brings together over 50 Futurist works by Gino Severini and more than 40 others by contemporary European artists, who, taking their lead from Georges Seurat, took up the theme of the modern dance. The dancing female figure is once again endowed with the pivotal prominence that she enjoyed in Severini’s first great solo exhibition, held at the Marlborough Gallery, London, in 1913; an exhibition that will, for the most part, be recreated here in Venice.
The works exhibited have been selected from internationally renowned public and private collections including The Museum of Modern Art and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou and Musée Rodin, Paris, the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, and the Tate Gallery, London. Among the works on display will be Dynamic Hieroglyphic of the Bal Tabarin (1912, The Museum of Modern Art, New York), shown in Italy for only the second time; Souvenirs de Voyage, (c.1911, private collection), a work fundamental to the artist’s pictorial development, and lost since 1911 until it reappeared in France in 1994; Dancer=Airplane Propellor=Sea, (1915, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), The Fête à Montmartre, (1913, Richard S. Zeisler Collection, New York) and many others. Among the works on paper in the exhibition, is almost the entire series of dancers and female portraits in charcoal and gouache executed for Severini’s solo exhibition in 1913, including some of the masterpieces of his graphic oeuvre, reunited for the first time. In addition to these, the exhibition will include the artist’s most abstract pastels of 1914, born from the lyricism of his ‘plastic analogies of dynamism’.
The exhibition has been curated by Daniela Fonti, author of the catalogue raisonné of the artist’s paintings, published in 1988 (Milan, Mondadori-Daverio).
Two masterpieces of Severini’s futurist period on display at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, (Blue Dancer, 1912, on long-term loan from the Gianni Mattioli Collection, and Sea=Dancer, 1914, of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection) provided the inspiration for the theme of this exhibition. It demonstrates the significance of the modern dance (that of the cabaret, café-chantant and music hall) to the resurgence of European art between the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, while at the same time broadening our understanding of the centrality of the dancing figure in the work of Severini.
The theme of the dance, more than any other, fired the experimental imagination of Severini during the futurist period. A legacy of the French fin de siècle pictorial imagination, the dance became for Severini an icon of modernity, a metaphor for dynamism and a vehicle for the exploration of a new means of perception – the synthesis of a world built on his principles of rhythm and the physical and psychological involvement of the spectator. Portraits and vintage photographs in the exhibition recognizes the contributions of Isadora Duncan and Loïe Fuller, revolutionary dancers and legends of the early 20th century who gave Severini the conviction that movement expressed by the human form was the quintessential articulation of modernity and a stimulus for the pictorial research of the avant-garde.
According to the curator, Daniela Fonti, the world of the music-hall established itself early in Severini’s imagination as a showcase for the most complete and direct expression of the ideas of dynamism and simultaneity which was proclaimed by Futurism as the root of modernity. From the earliest works such as The Black Cat (1910-11, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa) recalls the world of the Parisian cabaret, through the series of paintings including Tango Argentino (which, like The Bear Dance, is exhibited in several versions) dedicated to the fashionable dances of the day, the theme progressively abandons all descriptive reference and moves towards the expression of a pure musical rhythm. At the end of 1914 Severini enriched the subject with the depth and complexity inherent in the abstract form, in such a way as to allude to cosmic movement and convey the ‘Orphic’ theme of the glorification of light. In the final works that portend to lead to the Cubist discipline, Severini definitively confirmed the theme of the dance as the motif, vehicle for stylistic exercise and a system for interpreting the world.
A context for Severini’s is produced by the inclusion of paintings, sculptures, works on paper and photographs dedicated to the theme of the dance by his contemporaries; this appendix begins with the mandatory homage to Georges Seurat (represented by Study for “Le Chahut”, c.1889, Courtauld Institute Gallery, London) and includes members of the Futurist group (Boccioni, Depero, Balla, Sironi, Prampolini and Cominetti), English Vorticism (Nevinson and Wyndham Lewis), the Die Brücke group (Kirchner and Heckel) and several other artists including Man Ray, Muybridge, Gaudier-Brzeska and Van Doesburg. The presence of Auguste Rodin, represented by life drawings of dancers in movement and an exquisite portrait of Isadora Duncan, is significant. The sculptor, himself fascinated by the modern dance of the time, organized performances by both Duncan and Loïe Fuller, which are recorded in a series of original photographs from Rodin’s personal collection (on loan from the Musée Rodin, Paris).
An audio-visual section of the exhibition presents the documentary Gino Severini, made in 1967 by the artist’s grandson Sandro Franchina. Recordings of Futurist-inspired music from the first two decades of the 20th century can be heard in the exhibition galleries: the pieces were chosen and performed on the piano by Daniele Lombardi, a musician, artist and composer famous for his studies of futurist music. On September 13, there will be a concert by Daniele Lombardi at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. This concert has been realised in collaboration with the Fondazione Pergolesi Spontini and represents the last musical event of the first Festival Pergolesi Spontini.
The exhibition is documented by a catalogue (published by SKIRA in English and Italian editions) with essays by Daniela Fonti, Silvia Carmignani, John Gage, and contributions by Gabriella Belli, Elena Gigli, Bärbel Hedinger, Claudie Joudrin and Jasper Sharp.
With the generous contribution of Delta Air Lines and The Murray and Isabella Rayburn Foundation, New York, thanks to Maurice S. Kanbar.
Official Carrier for the exhibit: Alitalia
The exhibit is open every Saturday evening until 10 pm thanks to RAS
The programs of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection are made possible by the support of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection Advisory Board, Banca del Gottardo, Regione Veneto, and:
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INTRAPRESÆ COLLEZIONE GUGGENHEIM