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Spiritual crisis and the 'call to order': the early aesthetic writings of GinoSeverini and Jacques MaritainZoë Marie Jones
Online Publication Date: 01 January 2010
To cite this Article Jones, Zoë Marie(2010)'Spiritual crisis and the 'call to order': the early aesthetic writings of Gino Severini andJacques Maritain',Word & Image,26:1,59 — 67
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Spiritual crisis and the ‘call to order’: the early aestheticwritings of Gino Severini and Jacques MaritainZOE MARIE JONES
In 1937 the art critic Corrado Pavolini interviewed the renowned
neo-Thomist French philosopher Jacques Maritain for the
Italian art journal Il Frontispizio. The interview took place at
the Roman residence of the artist Gino Severini, a close friend
and spiritual prote�ge�e of Maritain. Although the subsequent
article was little more than a general profile of Maritain with
no reference to his philosophical achievements, Pavolini’s use of
descriptive artistic analogies makes it noteworthy. Pavolini
writes that Maritain ‘‘didn’t seem to be a philosopher, but
reminded one more of a painter: the last surviving of the
Impressionists: with an invisible folding easel, a box of colors
slung across his shoulder, a pipe at an angle from his mouth,’’
and concludes the essay with the observation that Maritain’s
overall appearance ‘‘makes one think of a painting begun by
Cezanne and finished by Renoir.’’1 Pavolini’s curious metaphors
attribute a profoundly artistic character to Maritain’s
personality and, accurate or not, they do much to illuminate
the philosopher’s close relationship with modernist artists of the
interwar years. By examining the relationship betweenMaritain
and one of these artists, the former Italian Futurist Gino
Severini, I will reveal the shared assumptions underlying the
aesthetic writings of both artist and philosopher, and in so doing
underscore the relevance of neo-Catholicism for an
understanding of the avant-garde in interwar France.
To date the impact of Catholicism on Cubist aesthetics in
interwar France — and on Severini in particular — has received
little attention among Anglo-American scholars writing on the
avant-garde’s so-called ‘‘return to order’’ in Paris between the
wars.2 As a result, art historians have not sufficiently grasped the
extent to which this ‘‘return to order’’ often was also a return to
religious belief in the guise of neo-Catholic aesthetics.3 I seek to
overcome this lacuna by demonstrating how Severini’s synthesis
of avant-gardism and tradition in the early 1920s helped shaped
Maritain’s own assessment of modernism’s spiritual import. The
alliance forged by Severini andMaritain, which arose in part as a
response to the spiritual, political, and economic crisis precipi-
tated by the First World War, set a precedent for other such
collaborations, most notably that between the Dominican
Marie-Alain Couturier and modernists such as Henri Matisse
following the upheaval of the Second World War.4
Severini and Maritain first met in 1923. This initial encounter
resulted in a strong intellectual and personal affinity based on
mutual respect and support for each other’s theories about art
and aesthetics.5Although each began the twentieth century with
vastly different objectives and life experiences, their emergent
intellectual and philosophical principles were strikingly similar.
Even before their first meeting, Severini and Maritain had
independently renounced their earlier adherence to the ideology
of philosopher Henri Bergson and instead formed a theory of art
and beauty that was based on the ideal of the artist as an ‘‘honest
workman’’ and a close study of the methods and practices of
classical scholars and artisans. Although the ideas of both men
continued to undergo revision, each had written key texts before
their initial introduction. Art et scolastique (1920) by Maritain and
Du cubisme au classicisme (1921) by Severini illustrate a surprising
amount of overlap in ideas and reveal the philosophical and
intellectual foundation for what would become an immediate
and lasting friendship. A close reading of these texts and their
subsequent impact on the European artistic community is neces-
sary to document the overall trajectory of the modernist agenda
shared by both Severini and Maritain and its adaptation to new
conditions during the interwar years.
Severini’s return to Catholicism
By the time Severini was first introduced toMaritain in the early
1920s he had already turned away from his earlier Futurist and
avant-garde roots and was experimenting with a more classical
and rational style. In his 1946 autobiography, he writes of a
strong desire for certainty and confirmation in the face of the
profound disorder immediately following First WorldWar. This
sentiment accompanied a return to Catholicism around 1919.6
The sequence of events that led up to Severini’s ‘‘conversion’’
speak of his increasing disillusionment with the state of the world
as well as a number of profound personal tragedies, including
the loss of his infant son Tonio, the death of his dear friends
Umberto Boccioni and Guillaume Apollinaire during the war,
his family’s poor health, and his continually precarious financial
situation.7 In other words, intense personal grief and suffering
combined with a general state of anxiety resulting from the
uproar and chaos taking place throughout Europe. This led to
an overwhelming inner crisis that ultimately led Severini to
reconsider the disdain for religion that permeated the thought
of his fellow Futurists. This culminated in two events: the
baptism of his young daughter, Gina, and a renewal of his
marriage vows to Jeanne Fort in the Catholic church.8
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It is particularly significant that the priest Gabriel Sarraute
presided over the Catholic marriage of Severini and his wife of
10 years, Jeanne Fort. Severini recalls in a memoir that one
Sunday in 1922 her husband went to Saint Germain en Laye
to visit the painter Maurice Denis, a central figure in the grow-
ing Catholic artistic community. Denis had played a significant
role in leading Severini back to Catholicism and inspired him to
follow his own example of putting his developing aesthetic
theories onto paper. At Denis’ studio Severini was introduced
to the young Sarraute, who was already familiar with the artist’s
treatiseDu cubisme au classicisme.9Drawn together by their mutual
interest in the correlations between modernism and classicism,
the two became immediate friends. Severini soon intensified this
relationship by taking Sarraute into his confidence and asking
for his assistance in arranging a Catholic marriage for himself
and his wife.10
Shortly after this ceremony Sarraute was asked to celebrate
the first mass in Maritain’s new private chapel at his house in
Meudon. The service was to have been held by the abate Daniel
Lallement, but at the last minute he fell ill and asked Sarraute to
substitute for him.11 While Sarraute had not previously met the
Maritains, his participation in such a significant event brought
him into their inner circle and paved the way for the eventual
introduction of the artist and philosopher. Soon after that
Sarraute was unfortunately called to the south of France on
permanent religious assignment. Although Sarraute was appre-
hensive about abandoning Severini in the midst of the painter’s
spiritual crisis, he consoles the readers of his memoirs by recal-
ling that ‘‘leaving Paris I had entrusted Severini to Maritain.’’12
The impact of Bergsonian thought
Like the Futurists, both Maritain and his partner Raıssa
Oumansoff initially found in Bergson’s metaphysical philosophy
an answer to the spiritual void left by the reigning positivism of
the times. Raıssa recalls in her memoir, Les grandes amitie�s, souve-
nirs, that ‘‘by means of a marvelously penetrating criticism
Bergson dissipated the anti-metaphysical prejudices of a
pseudo-scientific positivism, and recalled the mind to its real
function, to its essential liberty . . . . He created an enthusiasm in
us, a joyous recognition which was to survive through the years,
even through grave philosophical divergences.’’13
By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the Maritains
had completely abandoned the secular teachings of Bergson and
had instead turned to Catholicism and the teachings of St.
Thomas Aquinas. While this shift was certainly dictated by
personal choices, it also coincided with a general sense of unease
about Bergsonian teachings within the Catholic community.
Specifically, the ideas of Bergson were being cast as polluted
by ‘‘Asiatic’’ philosophy and were thus seen as ‘‘foreign’’ to the
church.14 While not directly referring to this debate, Maritain
sought to distance himself from his former Bergsonism in his
early philosophical work from the period 1910–1914.15 In these
works Maritain separated Thomistic philosophy from its secular
cousins, specifically Bergsonism.While he systematically criticizes
the philosopher’s most influential ideas in La philosophie bergsonienne
—most prominently those of intuition, dynamism, duration, and
the concept of creative evolution — he also credits Bergson with
helping to lift the veil of nineteenth-century positivism and
encouraging a renewal of human thought.16 Maritain also seeks
to distinguish Bergson’s underlying intention, which he sees as
wholly compatible with the ideas of neo-Thomism, from the
erroneous application of his ideas and Bergson’s tendency to
disregard ‘‘being’’ in favor of ‘‘becoming’’ and ‘‘intellect’’ in
favor of ‘‘intuition.’’17 In addition, he praises Bergson for being a
‘‘scrupulous and conscientious worker’’ (a high compliment from
Maritain and one that he would later also give to Severini) and for
the ‘‘subtlety and penetration of his thought, his love for truth’’
and his ‘‘desire for a truly disinterested philosophy in true con-
formity with the real.’’18
Maritain’s critique of Bergsonism found reinforcement in the
reactionary ideals of the Action Francaise, an extreme right-wing
group founded in 1899 and lad by Charles Maurras.19 Maurras
believed that Bergsonism was partly responsible for the chaos in
which France found itself in the years after the First World War.
The Action Francaise was opposed to the secular and anti-clerical
nature of the French Republic and instead desired a restoration
of the French monarchy and its nationalistic views. Although
Maritain never officially joined the movement and he did not
entirely subscribe to the group’s conservative views on modern-
ism, he had many close allies and friends (including Maurice
Denis) who were members.20 In 1920 the philosopher strength-
ened his connection to the Action Francaise by joining with
Charles Maurras, Henri Massis, and Jacques Bainville to
found La revue universelle, a journal tied to the movement in all
but name.21 In 1926 the Action Francaise was condemned by Pope
Pius XI as a danger to the true Catholic spirit and Maritain
withdrew his support from Maurras (later calling his involve-
ment with the movement and its reactionary politics a terrible
mistake). However, during the early 1920s the nationalistic and
conservative influence of the Action Francaise and its emphasis on
the revival of French traditionalism can certainly be seen in
Maritain’s thinking and at times conflicted with his support of
modernist and foreign artists such as Severini.22
Maritian was highly critical of Bergsonism and the appropria-
tion and distortion of Bergson’s original ideas by over-
enthusiastic avant-garde theorists. In a 1914 text, he cites a
passage from the catalog of the Futurists seminal 1912 exhibit
at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in Paris. While the Futurists claim
that their Cubist nemeses ‘‘persist in painting the immobile, the
frozen and all the static states of nature,’’ they, ‘‘with absolute
futuristic points of view,’’ seek to renew art by expressing move-
ment. In short, ‘‘the gesture [they] wish to reproduce on canvas
will no longer be a fixed instant of universal dynamism . . . it will
be nothing short of dynamic sensation itself.’’23 According to
Maritain, this is a simplified and populist version of Bergson’s
theories of dynamism and becoming, which in their truest form
do not require evidence of actual movement or visible change.
Thus, while Bergsonian philosophy is to be criticized because it
60 ZOE MARIE JONES
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‘‘offends intelligence and ruins the principles of reason,’’ Futurist
ideology commits the even greater crime of offending ‘‘sense
perception and the testimony of our eyes.’’24 However, in the
1927 edition of La Philosophie bergsonienne Maritain tempers his
previous claim by clarifying in a footnote that it is only the
bombastic theories of the Futurist movement that deserve such
criticism, and not the paintings themselves. He also excuses
Severini in particular from this criticism stating that Severini,
‘‘a very good friend and a most honest and scrupulous artist . . .
whose horizon has greatly broadened since then, will pardon
this allusion to his early struggles.’’25
While Severini had indeed moved beyond these ‘‘early strug-
gles’’ by the time he met Maritain, many of the artist’s initial
Futurist images were undeniably influenced by Bergsonian phi-
losophy. These images, particularly those depictingMontmartre’s
dancehalls, attempt to incorporate Bergson’s theory that only
through intuition and memory is it possible to enter into a
thing, perceiving it from the inside rather than from the outside.
According to Bergson it is only through this process that one may
grasp the absolute, or in Severini’s words, ‘‘total reality.’’26 Thus,
images such as The Dynamic Hieroglyphic of the Bal Tabarin from 1912
(figure 1) place a significant emphasis on the collective and unify-
ing energy of modern life and attempt tomerge all elements of the
environment (dancers, spectators, music, rhythm, light, etc.) in
accordance with Bergsonian notions of individual intuition and
the dynamic interpenetration of forms.
While paintings such as The Dynamic Hieroglyphic remain firmly
embedded in Futurist practice and theory, they also point to a
shift in Severini’s aesthetics. Although he was an official member
of F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist movement and nominally adhered
to Futurist ideology, Severini resided in Paris and interacted
with his Futurist colleagues primarily through written corre-
spondence. As a result, Severini’s primary artistic community
was made up of members of the Parisian avant-garde such as
Picasso and Braque, the Puteaux Cubists (primarily Gleizes,
Metzinger, and Le Fauconnier), and Robert Delaunay. Thus,
Severini’s work and ideas during the years leading up to First
World War attest to an assimilation of Cubist sources that led
the artist to adopt an intermediary position between the French
and Italian avant-gardes.27
Severini’s growing disillusionment with Futurism during the
war years led him first toward Cubism and then to a new
definition of classicism, a style that the artist had already experi-
mented with in 1916 with the paintings Maternita (figure 2) and
Ritratto di Jeanne.28However, it was not until after the FirstWorld
War and the publication of Du cubisme au classicisme that this
theoretical shift took a concrete form (the artist later insisted
that his project had always been to find a synthesis of these
Figure 1. Gino Severini, The Dynamic Hieroglyphic of the Bal Tabarin (1912,
Museum of Modern Art, New York).
Figure 2. Gino Severini, Maternita (1916, Museo dell’ Accademia Etrusca e
della Citta di Cortona).
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impulses).29 By divorcing himself from the stylistic forms of
Futurism, Severini also turned away from the movement’s athe-
istic tendencies and revolutionary politics. While Marinetti and
the remaining Futurists aligned themselves initially with
Mussolini’s nascent Fascist movement in the years directly
after the war (only rejecting this connection when it became
clear that Fascism had moved too far to the Right), Severini
rejected this line of thought and instead embraced the conser-
vative beliefs of the Catholic Church and the teachings of the
classical masters.30
A meeting of minds: neo-Thomism and classicism
Severini’s writings from the war years, most notably two articles
published in theMercure de France in 1916 and 1917, trace the process
of his artistic and political transformation.31 These texts link the
Futurist statement quoted by Maritain above to Severini’s new
approach in Du Cubisme au classicisme by presenting the problem of
painting as defining a ‘‘new sense of space’’ that must leave behind
individual intuition and instead find a foundation in a universally
recognized system of values: geometry and mathematics.
Severini’s Du Cubisme au classicisme was first published in 1921
through the patronage of Le�once Rosenberg, director of the
L’Effort moderne gallery (which was then representing Severini)
and the publisher J. Povolozky (an old acquaintance from the
days of the cafe� Closerie des Lilas). While the book is dedicated to
the memory of Umberto Boccioni, a staunch adherent to the
ideas of Bergson and to Futurism until his untimely death in
1916, the text distances itself from this and other avant-garde
movements and instead positions itself as a manual for the artist
who wished to follow Severini in bridging the gap between the
excesses and exaggerations of the avant-garde and the rational
and mathematical rules of classical technique.
Although Severini’s treatise was written without any knowl-
edge of Maritain’s contemporaneous theories, the similarities in
their thinking soon became apparent. At the end of their first
meeting Maritain gave Severini a copy of his own artistic trea-
tise, Art et scolastique, published in 1920.32 In this volumeMaritain
discusses the condition of contemporary artistic production and
connects it to scholastic theological arguments, such as the
relationship between Universal Beauty, God, and the timely
beauty of modernist art. In a grateful letter to Maritain shortly
after this encounter, Severini writes of the book as ‘‘infinitely
precious to me. It was given to me in the precise moment in
which I felt the need to look at art from this same point of view.
In sum I found in your book the confirmation of my last
conclusions and the tools for deepening this aspect of the artistic
question.’’33 Severini was profoundly moved by Maritain’s
treatise and saw in it ‘‘the confirmation of certain thought
patterns, certain ways of clarifying these to myself and to
others.’’34
Severini also discovered in Art et Scolastique a much more
material confirmation of his own work, to which Maritain
makes a reference in his chapter on ‘‘Art and Beauty.’’ In his
discussion of integrity and proportion Maritain states that these
concepts have no absolute signification and must be understood
solely in relation to the end of the work.35 He uses the apparent
incompleteness of a Futurist painting as an example of this
concept, writing
If it pleases a futurist [sic] to give the lady he is painting only
one eye, or a quarter of an eye, no one denies him the right to
do this: one asks only — here is the whole problem— that this
quarter of an eye be precisely all the eye this lady needs in the
given case.36
Although neither Severini nor the title of the painting was
specifically mentioned in the text, Severini remembers Maritain
saying that his painting La danseuse obse�dante from 1911 (figure 3)
provided the inspiration for the comment.37Maritain’s choice of
this painting was especially prudent as the work exemplifies the
prismatic fragmentation and sense of disquiet that critics of
modernist aesthetics found so confounding and that the philo-
sopher was attempting to defend. The presence of this reference
in Maritain’s writing is also evidence that the philosopher had
taken notice of and was contemplating Severini’s work even
before their first meeting.38
The basic conception of art and its role in society advocated
by Severini’s Du Cubisme au classicisme parallels that found in
Figure 3. Gino Severini, La danseuse obse�dante (1911, private collection).
62 ZOE MARIE JONES
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Maritain’s Art et scolastique. Severini sought to leave behind the
fragmentation and impulsivity that had characterized his
Futurist period and to instead bring the ‘‘dynamism’’ and
‘‘renewal’’ of modern art into a harmonious relationship with
the ‘‘unity’’ of classicism. The artist believed that the ultimate
purpose of art is to ‘‘create a harmony’’ and ‘‘to reconstruct the
universe according to the laws by which it is determined.’’39
Building on the Scholastic philosophers, Maritain had ascer-
tained that the absolute goal of art is to achieve Beauty, by which
he means a sense of perfection and harmony that is based on
eternal laws. Although Maritain gives this statement an explicit
religious connotation by professing that when art is able to reach
this end it will be able to transcend human nature and achieve a
sense of the divine, both his and Severini’s concept of art stem
from the same search for perfection and universiality.
Severini and Maritain place the creation of art firmly within
the realm of productive action. This view requires that the work
of art be an action that consists of imprinting an idea on matter,
not of allowingmatter to dictate the idea. Thus, the work of art is
something that must always be ‘‘thought’’ before being ‘‘made’’
and must never be guided by impulse or left to the caprices of
chance. For Maritain this means that art ‘‘will always retain
something of the spirit because it is ripened in the mind before
passing into matter.’’40 In order for this transference from mind
into matter to take place, the artist must control his production
through the use of formal elements, i.e., mathematics and
geometry. Maritain warns of the dangers of ignoring this advice,
writing that if the formal element is weakened then the reality of
art disappears and the work becomes ‘‘sensual slush.’’41To avoid
this unappealing end, it is imperative that an artist correctly uses
the universal laws of science.42
Severini, both as an artist and a theorist, illustrated how the
modern artist could go about acquiring this knowledge. In order
to distance himself from the ‘‘false’’ geometry and science of
Cubism and Futurism, Severini began to seriously study math-
ematical and geometric theories as early as 1918 and elaborated
on his findings in Du Cubisme au classicisme. He consulted, among
others, the contemporary theories of the mathematician Raoul
Bricard (he even visited the scholar in his offices at the College
de France43), the architectural theories of Vitruvius, Alberti,
Viollet-le-Duc, and Choisy, the geometrical explorations of
Da Vinci, and Durer’s treatise on proportion.44 In these works
he found confirmation that the concept of number, or the
immutable laws of geometry, would lead him toward an ideal
art of purity and harmony.
Throughout Du Cubisme au classicisme Severini’s constant
emphasis is on a meticulous method of ‘‘construction’’ that he
distilled from his study of these theories. He states that the work of
art must be ‘‘constructed, piece by piece, like a machine.’’45 He
divides this technique into three distinct parts: (1) the internal
conception, (2) the scientific and quantitative construction,
(3) and the execution. In the first phase, the artist accumulates
‘‘materials of all kinds like an architect, piling up in a corner the
stones, bricks, beams and lime which he will use for the
building.’’46 In the second phase, ‘‘that of the compass, of the
protractor, and of the set square,’’ the artist follows a ‘‘plan’’ and
‘‘lays the foundation of the edifice . . . raising its inner structure
and principle walls.’’47 This stage culminates in the careful con-
struction of a tracciato, or a scale drawing over which a complex
system of geometrical diagrams has been charted (figure 4).48 In
the third phase, this framework is removed, ‘‘the edifice is fin-
ished, the scaffolding disappears and the walls are painted.’’49
Severini places no limit on the amount of time that it takes to
produce a work of art in this fashion and instead advocates
patience and diligence throughout, saying that it can take months
or even years to bring a single work to fruition.50
Severini argues that contemporary art is in a state of anarchy
and degeneracy because the principles of construction and geo-
metry that were perfected in the Italian Renaissance had been
gradually forgotten. He laments that very few contemporary
artists possess the ability to grasp the true nature of art and that
this regrettable fact has largely come about due to an inadequate
understanding of mathematics and geometry. Severini believed
that the art of the twentieth century had thus far taken one of two
routes, both of which have led to a degenerative state. The first
was built on the misunderstood application of the laws of geome-
try and resulted in the ‘‘sensual’’ (by which he means false)
intellectualism of the Ecole des Beaux Arts.51 The second was
followed by avant-garde artists who ‘‘sought to excite admiration
through surprise and not through the pure beauty of the forms of
the mind.’’52 Instead of attempting to follow the teachings of the
classical masters through the study of the scientific and geometric
laws of number, these ‘‘artists have preferred to affirm their own
individuality, independently of any rule or method — but in
running after originality they have only arrived at singularity.’’53
Severini found in Maritain’s writings a justification of his own
critique of the general state of the arts in contemporary times. For
Figure 4. Gino Severini, Figure xx (From Cubism to classicism, 1921), p. 98.
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example, inArt et scolastiqueMaritainwrites that the ‘‘modern artist
is confronted with an insane problem: a choice between the
senility of academic rules and the primitiveness of natural gift:
with the latter, art does not yet exist, except in potentiality; with
the former, it has ceased to exist at all.’’54
In order to rectify this situation both the artist and the philo-
sopher believe that an artist must focus on ‘‘rebuilding the
Universe through the aesthetic of number and of the mind,’’ a
project that was perfected by the Greeks and was rediscovered
by the artists and humanists of the early Renaissance.55 Thus
science and art must be reunified, as the forced division of these
disciplines has been one of the great causes of the decline of art
in past centuries. Severini views this unification as ‘‘the begin-
ning of a new art, closely related to science, developing together
with it, and capable of attaining an intensity of expression and a
transposition of universal life of a perfection such as no-one has
yet been able to imagine.’’56
One of the ways that this unity could be attained was by a
return to craftsmanship and an apprenticeship system.
Severini’s and Maritain’s mutual support for this system stems
from their admiration of the craftsman/guild workshops of the
medieval era.57 They believed that the collective nature of these
workshops prevented artists from falling prey to the cult of
individualism that appeared during the later Renaissance.
According to Maritain, in medieval times artists did not work
out of a desire for fame or wealth but applied their services in the
name of faith. In contrast, the individualistic nature of the
Renaissance only succeeded in driving ‘‘the artist mad by chan-
ging this and revealing to him his own peculiar grandeur.’’58
While neither Severini nor Maritain’s texts were meant as
polemics, both are quick to critique the working methods of past
art movements. Severini, as we have seen, is particularly critical
of what he sees as a superficial quality inherent to the avant-
gardes (particularly Impressionism, Futurism, and Cubism) and
opposes their emphasis on a process of intuition, putting forth
his own (rediscovered) process of reason and diligence.59 For
Severini, ‘‘Cubism is still in the last stage of Impressionism in
that it is instinctive and sensorial’’ and thus bases itself on
empiricism because it ignores mathematical rules.60 As a result
of this ignorance Cubism is restricted to a decorative and sym-
bolic art and is incapable of further development. Through a
diligent study of geometry, however, he claims that artists can
realize the potential for new modes of expression and ‘‘a poetry
of a higher order.’’61
Despite the force of Severini’s accusations, in Du Cubisme au
classicisme there are still traces of the language that had charac-
terized his own earlier avant-garde writings. For example, he
writes that although the creation of art is a problem of ratios and
construction, ‘‘to this is attached the living, dynamic conception
of art, a conception which I have always defended since my
futurist researches, and which is based on this understanding of
the universe in terms of the atomic laws of ‘vibrations’ or of
‘undulations.’ ’’62 Yet, according to Severini, it is only through
mathematical laws of harmony that the means of translating
these vibrations into works of art have been made clear. Severini
thus argues that his work is still able to embody a ‘‘dynamic’’
conception of space. Even though the subject may be static,
the geometrical formulas used to arrive at its depiction endow
it with a sense of dynamism and movement. Statements such as
this attempt to link his current work with his avant-garde past
and thus forge a line of continuity across the entirety of his
artistic career.63
Maritain, also, while he is critical of the ‘‘barbarous dogma-
tism of its theorists,’’ finds in the avant-garde’s basic impulse a
constructive tendency that causes him to ask if Cubism might
represent a renewed search for a pure art and a desire to free
painting from the shackles of Academic imitation. Thus he
appears to be willing to credit Cubism with good intentions, if
not success. However, he adds to this that ‘‘a few of the artists
(especially those who have only recently come under the Sign of
the Cube) [i.e Severini] . . . have leaned towards the logical
coherence and the simplicity and purity of means that properly
constitute the veracity of art.’’64 He also writes that ‘‘these days,
all the best people want the classical.’’65 By ‘‘best,’’ of course, he
means those who fit into his mission to bring together modern-
ism and the classical values of the Church.
In a footnote added to this statement in the second edition
(1927) of Art et scolastique, Maritain admits that the term ‘‘classi-
cal’’ has been overused in contemporary theory and he refers to
Severini’s Du Cubisme au classicisme as an example of the correct
application of classical technique and science to art. While
Maritain allows that the ‘‘protractor, the compass and the num-
ber’’ still belong to the material means of art and thus are not
able to constitute Art itself, he writes that they are ‘‘the first
necessary conditions of honest art’’ and that ‘‘Severini’s book is a
most valuable testimony on that score.’’66 In Maritain’s eyes
then, Severini’s treatise is a commendable first effort at analyz-
ing the nature and material conditions of art, but it is unable to
make the leap to the next level, to that of a truly spiritual art. In
order to fully grasp art on this higher plane, Severini would need
the spiritual guidance of Maritain.
While both Maritain and Severini emphasized the role of
formal and fixed rules in art, neither takes this to mean that
there is only one correct style or external form for art. Maritain
writes in Art et scolastique that ‘‘because in the fine arts the work-
to-be-made is an end in itself, and because this end is something
absolutely individual, something entirely unique, each occasion
presents to the artist a new and unique way of striving after the
end, and therefore of ruling the matter.’’67 Severini also main-
tains that ‘‘the ‘means’ do not vary from age to age, it is only the
external appearance of the work of art that changes. On the
basis of these eternal ‘means,’ themselves based on the eternal
laws of number, each age has been able to create its own style.’’68
These concepts were particularly important for Maritain’s
discussion of Christian art. He is adamant that there is no
technique, style, or system of rules that belong strictly to
Christian art. In order to make Christian art one should only
‘‘be Christian, and simply try to make beautiful work.’’69
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However, Maritain warns that this is not easily done: because
the artist can be considered an accomplice to God, he experi-
ences ‘‘a strange and saddening condition, where he must wear
himself out among bodies and live with spirits.’’70 Maritain’s
advice to the artist, then, was to ‘‘simply be, as an artist, what art
wants him to be — a good workman.’’71 According to Maritain,
‘‘the artist is subject, in the sphere of his art, to a kind of
asceticism, which may require heroic sacrifices . . . he must be
thoroughly undeviating as regards the end of his art, perpetually
on guard not only against the banal attraction of easy execution
and success but against a multitude of more subtle temptations
and against the slightest relaxation of his interior effort.’’72 This
statement must have been an infinite comfort to Severini, an
artist whose early career was racked with financial difficulty and
self-doubt.
Implicit in these comments is also the assertion that the artist
is to be set apart from the general populace through his ability to
approach the divine. This concept is reflected in Maritain’s later
claim that the artist ‘‘is not of this world, being, from the
moment that he works for beauty, on the path which leads
upright souls to God and manifests to them the invisible things
to the visible.’’73 Instead he is ‘‘a man who sees more deeply than
other men and who discloses in the real spiritual radiances
which others cannot discern.’’74The artist, then, has a particular
responsibility to society in that his works, when constructed with
care and diligence, are capable of leading ‘‘lesser’’ humans back
from their divergent paths and showing them a better future.
Modern art turning toward religion
Both Severini and Maritain believed that it is possible for an
artist to rise above the decadence that has come to characterize
their age and to push art forward in an honest and correct
direction. Severini, in the conclusion of Du Cubisme au classicisme,
states that the artistic community of the 1920s is primed and
ready to receive the guidance of an artistic ‘‘genius’’ who will
lead the way out of decadence and toward a ‘‘higher’’ art.75
Maritain, in a more overtly religious statement, argues that
what is needed is a spiritual guide, a sort of artistic Messiah.
Neither writer is sure who this guide will be, but both believe
that in the meantime the path can be prepared by a disciplined
education in technique and a study of the universal law of the
masters, which will ultimately give artists the necessary tools to
raise themselves above the anarchy of their era.
Years later, Maritain would look back on this period and find
in Severini a partial answer to his call for an artistic guide. He
writes in a short volume entitled Three painters that ‘‘Alexandre
Cingria [who worked with Severini on the Swiss church of
Semsales in the mid 1920s] is correct to affirm that Severini
should be hailed as ‘one of the powerful actors of the
Renaissance of religious art.’ ’’76 In this essay Maritain attempts
to justify the entirety of the artist’s career by casting it in a
language similar to that Severini used to describe his working
method: a time of internal searching and renewal (his Futurist
and Cubist years), a time of scientific and quantitative
construction (his study of classicism), and finally a time of execu-
tion in which his mature religious style emerges. Through the
consideration of Severini’s career as a continuum, ‘‘a constant
ascension,’’ even his Futurist works are to be admired for their
ability to ‘‘attain a true poetry’’ through their expressions of
‘‘joy’’ and the ‘‘ease of instinct.’’77 Severini, furthermore, is
singularly exceptional among his fellow avant-garde artists in
that he possessed a unique sense of spirit through which he was
able to ‘‘escape Cubism by going ahead of it,’’ uniting tradition
and modernity in a manner worthy of the great masters of the
past.78
While Maritain certainly viewed Severini as a link between
religion and modernism, the artist was by no means the only
cultural figure that fit these criteria. In allying himself with
Maritain during the interwar years, Severini joined a community
of artists and thinkers who were all searching for a way to cope
with a rapidly changing and de-centered world. Thomistic
thought provided a model for a new aesthetics that did not find
conflict between modernity and religious beliefs. Severini, a
foreign artist struggling to ground himself in a world that seemed
increasingly hostile, found personal and spiritual fulfillment in this
community and in Catholicism’s emphasis on the eternal. As
Gabriel Sarraute remembers, Severini was first able to leave
behind his troubled relationship with the avant-garde and enter
into the world of Catholic painters after his religious marriage
ceremony, but it was only after his friendship with Maritain had
solidified that he was able to find the spiritual mentorship and
intellectual exchange that were to help him through the difficult
years of the 1920s and 1930s.79 Maritain’s guidance gave valida-
tion to the ideas that had been tentatively laid down inDu Cubisme
au classicisme and ultimately helped Severini to construct an aes-
thetic framework in which the formal language of modernism, the
harmony provided by the church, and the craftsmanship of the
past would coexist and mutual benefit one another.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I thank my advisor at Duke University, Mark Antliff, the chief
curator of the historical archives at MART, Paolo Pettenella, and
Signora Romana Severini, Gino Severini’s youngest daughter, for
their help and guidance with this project. All images courtesy of#
2009 Artists’ Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.
NOTES
1 – Corrado Pavolini, ‘Ritrattino di Maritain,’ Il Frontispizio, n. 2 (1937).
Original Italian (all translations are my own unless otherwise stated): ‘Non
s’indovinerebbe il filosofo; fa pensare piuttosto a un pittore: che so, l’ultimo
superstite degli impressionisti: invisibile il cavalletto pieghevole, la cassetta
dei colori a tracolla, la pipa nell’angolo della bocca’; ‘Fa pensare cosı a un
dipinto incominciato da Ce�zanne e finito da Renoir’.
2 – Romy Golan, Christopher Green, and Kenneth E. Silver, in their
otherwise exemplary analyses of the ‘return to order’ during and after the
First World War, do not discuss the role of Catholicism in Severini’s later
aesthetics, his impact on Maritain, or Maritain’s influence on avant-garde
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circles in the 1920s and 1930s. See Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art
and Politics in France between the Wars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1995); Christopher Green, Cubism and Its Enemies (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1987); Kenneth E. Silver, Esprit De Corps: The Art of the
Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914–1925 (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1989). Christopher Green briefly references
Maritain in his discussion of Surrealist anti-clericalism in his important
overview of French modernism, Art in France, 1900–1945 (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 162–164.
3 – Notable exceptions in this regard include Bruce Adams and Romy
Golan’s discussions of the Bergsonism and neo-Catholicism of Albert Gleizes
and his followers, Jane Lee’s concise analysis of Maritain’s impact on the
former Cubist Andre� Lhote and writers for the La Nouvelle Revue Francaise in
the 1920s, and Aiden Nichols recent book on sacral aesthetics. See Bruce
Adams, Rustic Cubism: Anne Dangar and the Art Colony at Moly-Sabata (Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Romy Golan,Modernity and Nostalgia;
Jane Lee, ‘Andre� Lhote, art critic for La Nouvelle Revue Francaise,’ in Art
Criticism After 1900, ed. Malcolm Gee (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1993), pp. 85–96; Aidan Nichols, Redeeming Beauty: Soundings in Sacral
Aesthetics (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2007).
4 – For a brief overview of Couturier’s interaction with major modernists,
see Jean Lacambre, ‘Le Pere Marie-Alain Couturier’, in L’Art sacre� au
XXe Siecle en France, ed. Paul Andre� (Muse�e Municipal de Boulogne-
Billancourt, 1993), pp. 153–157. For Couturier’s own writings on modern
art and religion, see Marie-Alain Couturier, Sacred Art (Austin, TX:
University of Texas Press, 1989).
5 – Gabriel Sarraute, ‘Ricordi su Severini e Maritain’, in Piero Pacini, ‘Una
testimonianza inedita di Gabriel Sarraute su Severini e Maritain,’ Otto/
Novecento: Rivista bimestrale di critica letteraria, n. 3 (1985), 164.
6 – Gino Severini, The Life of a Painter: The Autobiography of Gino Severini
(Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1995), p. 262. Severini speaks of this
rediscovery of Catholicism not as ‘‘conversion,’’ as he had been born and
baptized into the religion, but as a decision to embrace and return to his roots.
7 – Piero Pacini, ‘Severini e Maritain. storia di una conversazione’, Nuova
Antologia, (June 1973), p. 272.
8 – Sarraute, ‘Una testimonianza inedita di Gabriel Sarraute su Severini e
Maritain’, p. 161.
9 – Jeanne Fort Severini, ‘Qualche ricordo fra le due guerre,’ in Gino Severini
‘Entre Les Deux Guerres’, ed. Maurizio Fagiolo, Ester Coen, and Gina Severini
(Roma: Straderini editore, 1980), p. 43. Sarraute also recalls that he had
heard of Severini at least 10 years before he met him, through an article on
the 1912 Futurist exhibition at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery in the weekly art
journal La France Illustre�e. Sarraute, impressed by a quote from the Futurists
that stated that ‘‘our work is drunk with spontaneity and power,’’ had clipped
this article out of the journal and saved it (Sarraute, p. 151).
10 – Jeanne Fort Severini, p. 44.
11 – Sarraute, p. 164.
12 – Ibid.
13 – RaissaMaritain, Les Grandes Amitie�s, Souvenirs (NewYork, 1941), p. 122–123.
14 – Robert C. Grogin, The Bergsonian Controversy in France, 1900–1914
(Calgary: The University of Calgary Press, 1998), p. 167.
15 – La Philosophie Bergsonienne: Etudes Critiques, Maritain’s first book, was
originally published by Marcel Riviere et Cie in 1914. In the Preface to the
Second Edition (1929) the author admits that his understanding of
Bergsonian philosophy was incomplete and that in retrospect the book is full
of shortcomings. However, he justifies its importance by saying that it was
one of the first manifestations of neo-Thomist thinking in pre-First World
War France and thus represents a crucial effort to swing the pendulum of
contemporary philosophical thought back into the trajectory of classical
thought. Jacques Maritain, Bergsonian Philosophy and Thomism, trans. Mabelle
L. and Gordon Andison (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), p. 11.
16 – Ibid., p. 278.
17 – Ibid., p. 285. Maritain distinguishes in this section between a
‘‘Bergsonism of Fact’’ and a ‘‘Bergsonism of Intention.’’ See also Mark
Antliff, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993) for a discussion of the phenomenon of
Bergsonism.
18 – Ibid., p. 281.
19 – See Eugen Weber, Action Francaise: Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth-
Century France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962) for a complete
history of the movement.
20 – Maritain actively encouraged his friends Henri Massis and Ernest
Psichari to join the movement; John Hellman, Emmanuel Mounier and the New
Catholic Left, 1930–1950 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), p. 23.
21 – In 1918 a French infantryman named Pierre Villard left his fortune, over a
million francs, jointly to Maritain and Charles Maurras. Maurras suggested
that they pool their resources to begin a new journal devoted to the intersec-
tions between royalist political views and Thomist theology. Although initially
skeptical, Maritain eventually joined the review as the editor of the philosophy
section. He resigned from his post in 1927. William R. Keylor, Jacques Bainville
and the Renaissance of Royalist History in Twentieth-Century France (BatonRouge, LA:
Louisiana state University Press, 1979), pp. 156–157.
22 – For an overview of the impact of the Action Francaise’s theory of classicism
on the conservative politics of Cubism, e.g. Maurras and Leon Daudet, see
Kenneth E. Silver, Esprit de Corps, pp. 103–104. Although Silver does not
address the impact of the Action Francaise on Maritain, one can extend these
precepts to encompass much ofMaritain’s aesthetics, which in turn made his
support for modern art an aberration when compared to the reactionary
aesthetics promoted by Maurras and other conservatives cited by Silver.
23 – Quoted in Maritain, Bergsonian Philosophy and Thomism, e.g. This final
statement was first published by the Futurists in their Futurist Painting:
Technical Manifesto of 1910, signed by Boccioni, Carra, Russolo, Balla, and
Severini.
24 – Ibid., p. 280.
25 – Ibid.
26 – Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (New York: Zone Books, 1991),
p. 38; Gino Severini, ‘Introduction’, in The Futurist Painter Severini Exhibits
his Latest Works (London: Marlborough Gallery, April 1913), reprinted in
Maria Drudi Gambillo and Teresa Fiori, eds, Archivi del Futurismo (Roma:
De Luca Editore, 1958), p. 113.
27 – In his autobiography Severini makes a distinction between his own
championing of French neo-Impressionism, which found compatibility with
the Bergsonism of the pre-war Cubists, and the Milanese Futurist’s adher-
ence to the technique of Italian Divisionism. Severini, Life of a Painter, p. 37.
For a discussion of the Puteaux Cubist’s understanding of Bergson, cf. Mark
Antliff and Patricia Leighten, Cubism and Culture (London: Thames and
Hudson, 2001), Chapter 2.
28 – AlthoughAnneCoffin Hanson dates the official end of Severini’s Futurist
period and subsequent shift to Cubism to 1917, it is clear that this was not a
transition that took place overnight.Many of Severini’s paintings from the war
years, such asWoman Seated in a Park from 1916, show an attempt to find a
middle ground between the impulses of Futurism and Cubism: Anne Coffin
Hanson, Severini Futurista, 1912–1917 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Art
Gallery, 1995). However, it is important to clarify that the Cubism with which
Severini experimented during and after the war was not the same Cubism to
which he had been exposed before thewar. By 1916Cubismhad been stripped
of its earlier Bergsonian leanings and was reconfigured as a rationalist, ‘‘Latin’’
movement that had been distilled and purified to conform to the ‘‘return to
order.’’ See Christopher Green, Cubism and Its Enemies: Modern Movements and
Reaction in French Art, 1916–1928 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).
29 – Hanson, p. 184.
30 – Gunter Berghaus, Futurism and Politics: Between Anarchist Rebellion and
Fascist Reaction, 1909–1944 (Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 1996), p. 118.
Severini was not the only member of the Futurist movement to distance
himself fromMarinetti’s political and aesthetic choices during these years; of
the original five members to sign the Manifesto of the Futurist Painters in 11
February 1910 only Giacomo Balla would continue to adhere to the
movement in its postwar form.
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31 – While a complete analysis of these essays is out of the scope of this
project, descriptions of the texts and their ability to reveal Severini’s
changing perspective can be found in the writings of Daniela Fonti and Peter
Brooke: Daniela Fonti, ‘1916–1920: Un nuovo Rinascimento dorico e pita-
gorico,’ in Gino Severini: Catalogo Ragionato (Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori
Editore, 1988); Peter Brooke, ‘Introduction,’ in Gino Severini, From Cubism to
Classicism (London: Francis Boutle Publishers, 2001).
32 – Severini, Life of a Painter, p. 287.
33 –Quote taken from a letter from Severini toMaritain dated 18 September
1923 located in the Archivi Maritain in Kolbsheim: quoted in Cecilia De Carli,
‘Giovanni Battista Montini e l’arte: Le grandi premesse (1920–1955): Da
Maritain agli artisti. Una mostra e le sue ragioni’, in Paolo VI e l’arte: Il coraggio
della contemporaneita: Da Maritain a Rouault, Severini, Chagall, Cocteau, Garbari,
Fillia, ed. Cecilia De Carli (Milano: Skira editore, 1997), pp. 13–31.
34 – Severini, Life of a Painter, p. 289.
35 – Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism and the Frontiers of Poetry, trans.
Joseph W. Evans (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1962), p. 25.
36 – Ibid., p. 27.
37 – Severini, Life of a Painter, p. 288.
38 – In the second (1927) edition of Art Et Scolastique Maritain added four
footnotes that referred specifically to passages from Du Cubisme au Classicisme,
proving that he had indeed studied Severini’s book and found its ideas
relevant to his own work.
39 – Severini, From Cubism to Classicism, p. 62.
40 – Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, p. 9.
41 – Ibid., p. 38.
42 – Ibid., p. 19.
43 – Jeanne Fort Severini, p. 43.
44 – Severini, Life of a Painter, pp. 210–212.
45 – Severini, From Cubism to Classicism, p. 101.
46 – Severini, From Cubism to Classicism, p. 133.
47 – Ibid., p. 134.
48 – Simonetta Fraquelli, ‘From Futurism to Classicism’, in Gino Severini: from
Futurism to Classicism, ed. Simonetta Fraquelli and Christopher Green
(London: Hayward Gallery Publishing, 1999), p. 17.
49 – Ibid., p. 135.
50 – Sarraute, ‘Ricordi su Severini e Maritain’, p. 155.
51 – Severini, From Cubism to Classicism, p. 55.
52 – Ibid.
53 – Ibid.
54 – Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, p. 41. According to Maritain, ‘‘to the extent
that the rules of the Academy prevail, the fine arts revert to the generic type of art
and to its lower species, themechanical arts’’ (Maritain,Art and Scholasticism, p. 48).
55 – Severini, From Cubism to Classicism, p. 61. Interestingly, Severini’s critique
of contemporary art practices implicitly suggests that although the Italians
had reached a height of geometric perfection during the Renaissance, the
French (or those living and working in France, including himself) were now
responsible for the restitution of these concepts. Maritain echoes this
sentiment in his later essay on Severini, going through great length to place
the artist firmly within the French tradition by stating that while the artist
was heir to the great accomplishments of the Italian past, he was now all but
Parisian in character, artistic lineage, and connections; Jacques Maritain,
Art and Poetry, trans. E.P. Matthews (New York: Philosophical Library,
1943), p. 31.
56 – Severini, From Cubism to Classicism, p. 132.
57 – A theory that was also shared and promoted by Severini and Maritain’s
mutual acquaintance Maurice Denis.
58 –Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, p. 22. Severini also affirms that during the
sixteenth-century ‘‘the ‘individual’ began to begin separating himself out and
attain originality and that this was the first step in the direction of deca-
dence’’ (Severini, From Cubism to Classicism, p. 56).
59 – He does, however, give some credit to the ambitions of these groups,
and particularly to Ce�zanne, saying that they cleared the ground for a
renewal of classical research by destroying the misguided rules of the
Academy —– a point of view echoed by Maritain (Severini, From Cubism to
Classicism, p. 102).
60 – Ibid., p. 60.
61 – Ibid., p. 101.
62 – Ibid., p. 63
63 – Severini, Life of a Painter, p. 184.
64 – Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, p. 53.
65 – Ibid.
66 – Ibid, p. 187.
67 – Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, p. 47.
68 – Severini, From Cubism to Classicism, p. 56.
69 – Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, p. 66.
70 – Ibid., p. 34.
71 – Ibid., p. 36.
72 – Ibid., p. 78.
73 – Ibid., p. 37.
74 – Ibid., pp. 59–60.
75 – Severini, From Cubism to Ccassicism, p. 140.
76 – Maritain, Art and Poetry, p. 37.
77 – Ibid., pp. 32 and 38.
78 – Ibid., p. 34.
79 – Sarraute, p. 162.
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