Commissioned for the offices of Alitalia, Beirut
Karim Matta, Beirut (sale: Sotheby Parke Bernet, New York, January 19, 1979, lot 111)
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

Art Institute of Chicago, 1980-1982, ཧon extended lo꧙an

After spending ten years in his native Italy, Severini returned to Paris in 1946, the city where he arrived forty years earlier in the company of fellow Ita🐻lians Umberto Boccioni and Giacomo Balla. Here Severini renewed his involvement with the Futurists, while introducing a new stylized figuration to his work. The present work was commissioned in 1955 for the Beirut offices of the Italian airline Alitalia. The previous year, the artist executed a related work for the airline’s Paris office.

Severini's art celebrates modernity and the machine. The present work commemorates the 1950s, a decade of great technological advancement including the first satellite, Sputnik, being launched in 1957, and the first man in space a few years later.  Throughout his career, Severini was preoccupied with the subject of the modern man. Piero Pacini writes, "At the first Futurist exhibition in February 1912, Gino Severini stood out from the other members of the group because of the way he celebrated modern life. His paintings ... were subtly permeated with that sense of the poetic quality of things which is hidden in the memory of feeling of those who live their youth with abandon and optimism" (Piero Pacini, Futurismo e Futurismi, Venice, 1986, p. 572).