Gino Severini and Futurist Ideography: Danzatrice = Mare

Abstract

Discussing the role of plastic analogy in Futurist painting in 1913, Gino Severini cautioned his audience to beware of mimesis in particular. I1 ne s'agit pas de representer en vitesse, he maintained, mais la vitesse de l'automobile (It is not a question of representing a speeding automobile but rather the speed of the automobile).1 Whereas individuals such as Francesco Meriano were committed to total in their works, Severini and most of his colleagues refused to divorce themselves from the world around them.2 Writing in the Mercure de France three years later, the artist repeated his earlier words and explained that the automobile's speed should be translated into dynamic ideas, emotions, and/or moods on the canvas. Par consequent, notre realisme, tout en etant le resultat de l'element idee et de l'element experience sensorielle, et bien qu'il soit exprime souvent par des formes geometriques, n'est pas une abstraction (Although our realism is the product of two elements: ideas and sensorial experience, often being expressed by geometric forms, it is therefore not an abstraction).3 While Severini clearly did not consider his art to be abstract, neither was he particularly willing to call it concrete. On the one hand, since it involved