Nature morte avec mandoline

The painting is a particularly finished still life study of very high quality, made in the early 1920s and corresponding to the early days of the business relationship between Severini and Leonce Rosemberg.

Arranged on a table covered with a burgundy-colored tablecloth are various objects including: a flute with sheet music, a mandolin, and a fruit bowl, all of which also appeared in the still lifes of coeval Gris and Picasso.

The peculiarity of this composition is undoubtedly the foreshortened table and the arrangement of individual objects that follow diagonals generating an overlapping of planes and interlocking of forms-notice in this regard the flute beak that goes behind the mandolin case and the pear petiole that overhangs its handle.

In that rectangular field the objects are arranged with crystal clarity and with precise symmetrical correspondences-the curve of the pitcher corresponds to that of the sheet and that of the mandolin to the mirror curve of the plate- within a space constructed according to mathematical proportional patterns that are clearly identifiable thanks to the preparatory tracing.

The result is a complex figuration where each object has its own point of view. Severini, after a strictly cubist period, from 1919 decided to study mathematics and descriptive geometry, elaborating new reflections later collected in the 1921 volume Du cubisme au classicisme. As a result of these reflections, the execution of each painting was in fact accompanied and preceded by drawings that set the composition on symmetries and correspondences that make explicit its harmonic composition.

The work in question, a kind of “tracing” halfway through the ideational final painting, already presents the essential chromatic composition with well-defined but not flattened backgrounds, which through hatches restore volume to the objects and precisely delimit each outline. It thus reflects, in a timely manner, the artist’s new directions.

The painting is preserved in excellent condition, the pictorial surface appears very compact and free of damage, and the artist’s signature is present: “G. Severini Paris.” Since it is therefore a work of very high quality, it was deemed appropriate to purchase it with pre-emption by the Pinacoteca di Brera, where, moreover, two works by the author are already preserved, forming part of the complex of decorative panels commissioned by Rosemberg for his apartment.