(Cortona/Arezzo 1883–1966 Paris)
La modiste, 1915, signed, dated G. Severini 1915, with a dedication by the artist’s wife Jeanne Severini, pencil on paper, 26.4 x 20.2 cm, framed, (MCC)

Photo certificate:
Romana Severini Brunori, archive no. 01, 7 September 2012

Provenance:
Atelier of the artist
Madame Jeanne Severini Collection (1897-1992, the artist’s wife), Paris
gift to the family of the present owner
- Private Collection Italy.

Literature:
J. Lassaigne, Les 13 Epis, Gino Severini, album des Dessins, Paris, 1947 tav. 3 with ill.
P. Pacini Gino Severini, disegni e incisioni scelti e annonitati dal Pacini, La Nuova Italia, Firenze 1977, tav. 20. with ill.
Daniela Fonti, Gino Severini: catalogo ragionato, Mondadori - Ed. Philippe Daverio, Milan, 1988, p. 250, no. 263B with ill.
Around 1915, Severini worked on the theme of milliners (Modiste) and, in 1916, he sent Stieglitz a linocut with that subject. For such a theme, which he blends with his Femme assise, Severini chooses a composition with displaced planes that he highlights with an elegant drawing full of dense shading, interchanged with round-shaped, ribbed surfaces in a classical execution:
he begins a process of withdrawal from figurative representations in favour of a geometric abstraction, a common line of research for several artists in his time