‘The cities to which I feel most strongly bound are Cortona and Paris: I was born physically in the first, intellectually and spiritually in the second.’
Gino Severini moved to Paris in November 1906 and by 1908 had firmly established himself as the French outpost of the Italian Futurist movement. Finding modernity in every corner of the city, Severini immersed himself in the culture of Montmartre and Montparnasse, capturing the intangible dynamism and vitality of the dancers and musicians of the music halls and cabarets in visual language that acted as a bridge between the bombastic Futurists and the Parisian avant garde.
Executed in 1913, Joueur de guitare dans un cabaret parisien belongs to an important group of charcoal drawings that integrate the dynamism of Futurism, whilst drawing on the dimensionality of Cubism that Severini saw in the work of other artists from the avant garde including Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Juan Gris. A letter written to Marinetti in April 1913, in the same year as the present work was created, provides insight into the artist's distinction between the two ‘inclinations’ as he calls them: "Cubism: reaction to Impressionism, objectivism, analysis, stasis. Futurism: continuation of Impressionism; simultaneity plastic states of mind; synthesis; dynamism in the sense of duration and displacement."
In this depiction of the Parisian guitar player, Severini employs a divisionist fragmentation of form, capturing the musician and his instrument in a composition of arcing fragmented lines. Despite the flattening of form, these shapes seem to pulsate with energy, as Severini captures the cadence of music and movement in both the gradient application of the charcoal and the contrasting highlights of red and white chalk which reverberate from the page. As man and instrument.mes rge, we see in full effect Severini’s belief that space and environment are optically determined and fluid, and that the human figure and everything that surrounds them is merely a part, albeit an inseparable one, of that.mes tamorphic reality.
1913 was a year of pivotal success for the artist, and at the age of 30, the Italian exhibited works from this series in his first solo exhibitions at the Marlborough Gallery in London (see fig. 1).
