Gino Severini. Gino Severini was an Italian painter and a leading member of the Futurist movement.
For much of his life he divided his time between Paris and Rome. He was associated with neo-classicism and the return to order in the decade after the First World War.
During his career he worked in a variety of media, including mosaic and fresco. He showed his work at major exhibitions, including the Rome Quadrennial, and won art prizes from major institutions.
Severini was born into a poor family in Cortona, Italy. His father was a junior court official and his mother a dressmaker.
He studied at the Scuola Tecnica in Cortona until the age of fifteen, when he and a group of fellow-classmates were expelled from the entire Italian school system for the attempted theft of exam papers. For a while he worked with his father; then in 1899 he moved to Rome with his mother. It was there that he first showed a serious interest in art, painting in his spare time while working as a shipping clerk. With the help of a patron of Cortonese origins he attended art classes, enrolling in the free school for nude studies and a private academy. His formal art education ended after two years when his patron stopped his allowance, declaring, I absolutely do not understand your lack of order. In 1900 he met the painter Umberto Boccioni. Together they visited the studio of Giacomo Balla, where they were introduced to