A Meeting of the Minds: Gino Severini, Jacques Maritain and Anton Luigi Gajoni | Justine Grace

Summary: Collaborations in Modern and Postmodern Visual Arts | Justine Grace Gino Severini is widely acclaimed in Italy and abroad as one of the founders of futurism. Yet his religious commissions and church decorations, despite being produced almost exclusively for ten years throughout the 1920s and 1930s and continuing to engage the artist throughout his career, have been largely ignored within the majority of the literature concerning the artist. My paper proposes to address this lacuna through a study of the dynamic collaboration between Gino Severini and the neo-Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain. Maritain’s influential text Art et Scholastique (1920) sought to relate the medieval metaphysic of St. Thomas Aquinas to the modern art world as a means of establishing a new methodology, grounded in Christian thought and social ethics, for thinking about modern aesthetics. Severini read the text in 1923, soon after their first meeting, which consequently marked the beginning of a truly reciprocal friendship where Maritain provided the assistance for Severini to make the leap to a spiritual art while Severini helped to shape the philosopher’s position on the import of modernism. Justine Grace is a PhD candidate in the School of Culture and Communications at the University of Melbourne. Her research focuses on the enduring presence of religious iconography and traditions in the modern and contemporary art world.