Le Nord-Sud

Gino Severini

Download hi-res image TITLE Le Nord-Sud
AUTHOR Gino Severini
DATE 1912
OBJECT TYPE AND MATERIAL Oil on canvas
DIMENSIONS cm 49 × 64
INVENTORY Reg. Cron. 5098
ROOM XV
FIRMA 1912. G. Severini
Work on display
Donation

After working alongside Boccioni and the Divisionist painters who were active around Giacomo Balla, he joined the Futurist movement in 1910, developing his own interpretation of it, of which Le Nord-Sud (1912) is one of the highest expressions: the work utilizes the typically Futurist form of the “simultaneous view,” which compresses chronologically successive images (the signs of the station, passengers) in the space of the picture and depicts a car of the subway moving through the station of Pigalle in a north-south direction.

Moving to Paris, he came into contact with the Cubists: his adherence to Synthetic Cubism is represented here by two still lifes of 1917 and 1918, where the decomposition of images theorized by Braque and Picasso is interpreted in an essentially decorative manner.