Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Gino Severini
French, Italian; 20th-century
New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art
54%
Visual Synthesis of the Idea: "War". 1914. Oil on canvas
It's amazing how quickly Cubism got gentrified. Whereas in Braque and Picasso the textual and collage elements seem to exist at once as surface and within pictorial space, the words in this Severini painting sit uncomplicatedly atop the literal canvas. Whereas the smears and daubs of paint in Cubism's early masterworks force all the various colliding planes into higher heights of spatial contradiction, Severini's brushwork is little more than decoration or accent upon his fairly sensible geometric arrangement: it's quite possible to parse this image, notwithstanding its occasional elision of object into object (vide the brick smokestack). Admittedly, there is something to be said for how well the artist has commanded this painting's density — the propeller-construction at center is of note — and there's a handsome sense of order to its colors. (The way the spacious reds and blues of the tricolor call out to the grays in the foreground by means of the underpainted whiteness they share). But overall, there's a facility to this painting's conception and presentation of space that suggests a misapprehension of Cubism's aims and a poor application of its techniques. (TFS, 2025)