Gino Severini: Quotes about art

Gino Severini was Italian painter. Explore interesting quotes on art.

Gino Severini: 56 quotes0 likes

“It was during the first years [1906-1910] that we [the Futurist artists] realized the presence of a dualism deep down within us, where another person, whom we ourselves do not know, tends, at the moment of the creative act, to supplant the person we believe ourselves to be and would like to be. It is difficult to bring these two individualities into accord, yet it is upon this accord that the development of a personality largely depends. My first contact with the art of Seurat whom I adopted, once and for all, as my master, did a great deal to help me to express myself in terms of the two simultaneous and often opposed aspirations. This opposition caused me much mental torture, I must admit..”

In an interview, 1956; as quoted in Letters of the great artists, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson , London, 1963, p. 247

“Art is nothing but humanized science.”

Quoted in: Deric Regin (1968) Culture and the Crowd. p. 86

“Philosophers and aestheticians may offer elegant and profound definitions of art and beauty, but for the painter they are all summed up in this phrase: To create a harmony”

Quoted in: Clint Brown (1998) Artist to Artist, p. 32

“Futurism and Cubism are comparable in importance tot the invention of perspective, for which they substituted a new concept op space. All subsequent movements were latent in them or brought about by them.... the two movements cannot be regarded as in opposition to each other, even though they started from opposite points; I maintain (an idea approved by Apollinaire and later by Matisse) that they are two extremes of the same sign, tending to coincide at certain points which only the poetic instinct of the painter can discover: poetry being the content and raison d'être of art.”

Source: The Life of a Painter - autobiography', 1946, Letters of the great artists', 1963, p. 248-249

“.. since then I have found consolation in Blake; 'Without Contraries is no progression', he says in his Proverbs of Hell. And Baudelaire's idea that 'Variety is an essential condition of life' seems to me to be in perfect accord with my aspirations and with my intention, as a Futurist painter, to put life in the place occupied by reasoning in the art of the Cubist period.”

Source: The Life of a Painter - autobiography', 1946, Letters of the great artists', 1963, p. 247