Gino Severini

Private Collection, Amsterdam
Sale: Christie's, Amsterdam, 1st June 1995, lot 317
Purchased at the above sale by the present owner

Daniela Fonti, Gino Severini, Catalogo ragionato, Milan, 1988, no. 191, illustrated p. 174

Executed on white wove paper, not laid down, taped to the overmount along all four edges. There are a few small fox marks. This work is in good condition. Colours: In comparison to the printed catalogue illustration, the paper has a more cream tonality and the black is stronger in the original.
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Executed in 1913-1914, Passo di Ballo is a rare and beautifully executed example of what is arguably Severini’s most important Futurist theme, that of the dancer in motion. Severini depicted his first dancers in 1911 and he continued to explore the subject over the next five years. The present work is exemplary of the Bergsonian integration of space and time which was of central importance to Futurism: a concept being simultaneously explored by the Cubists, but to more dizzying effect by the Futurists. Rejecting the single viewpoint perspective that had dominated Western art since the Renaissance, Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris had started to show how objects looked from multiple viewpoints simultaneously, resulting in their celebrated fragmented aesthetic. Whereas the Cubists mostly limited themselves to the inherently static still-life genre, the Futurists burst out onto the railways, the battlefield and the dancehalls of modern city life for inspiration: in short, anything that allowed for a visual exploration of movement and dynamism.

As the second Futurist Manifesto of 1910 proclaimed: 'Gesture, for us, will no longer be a single moment within the universal dynamism brought to a sudden stop: it will be outright dynamic sensation given permanent form. Everything is in movement, everything rushes forward, everything is in constant swift change. A figure is never stable in front of us but is incessantly appearing and disappearing. Because images persist on the retina, things in movement multiply, change form, follow one upon the other like vibrations within the space they traverse’. The dancer (or possibly dancers) of Passo di Ballo are almost completely abstract in their rendering, such is the extent of precarious dynamism and splintered planes. It is an image with no particular compositional focus, a celebration of the feeling of being overwhelmed by stimuli, nodding to the 'aleph', that place emvisaged by Jorge Luis Borges, from which the entire world is visible simultaneously.

Whilst the support of this work is two-dimensional, the pulsating rhythm of the forms manage to evoke the spirit and rhythm of the dance itself. The dancer appears to radiate a centrifugal force that spreads across the sheet and into the viewer's own space. As Ester Coen has observed: 'The Futurists declared that the traditional conception of space had been surpassed, that modern sensibility had made the faculty of perception more acute […]. Bodies were to be dematerialized in space, and matter liberated from the confines of form. The Futurists also affirmed their desire to paint the figure along with its surrounding atmosphere, to catapult the viewer into the centre of the painting' (Ester Coen, 'The Violent Urge Towards Modernity: Futurism and the International Avant-garde', in Italian Art of the 20th Century (exhibition catalogue), Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1989, p. 49).  

Futurist painting burst into the consciousness of the international art world with the opening of the exhibition Les Peintres futuristes italiens at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris in February 1912, and the following month with a group exhibition at Herwarth Walden's Galerie der Sturm in Berlin. 'At the first Futurist exhibition in February 1912, Gino Severini stood out from the other members of the group because of the way he celebrated modern life. His paintings rejoiced in the gay spectacle of Parisian life and were subtly permeated with that sense of the poetic quality of things which is hidden in the memory of feeling of those who live their youth with abandon and optimism' (Piero Pacini, Futurismo e Futurismi (exhibition catalogue), Palazzo Grassi, Venice, 1986, p. 572). Indeed, in his depictions of dancers Severini managed to harness the rigid geometric rhythms explored by Balla and other Futurist artists in fluid rhythms, rendering the spectacle of modernism through the seduction of Parisian nightlife in a highly original and personal style. Influenced by the atmosphere of Paris, the present work is an exceptional example of Severini’s ability to evoke the pulsating sensations of the city. It is frenzied. It is precarious. It is exciting. Passo di Ballo is an exceptional example of all the elements that have quite rightly, after one hundred years since the first manifesto was published in 1909, prompted the recent reappraisal and re-appreciation of Futurist art.