Severini, Gino (1883-1966)
Il gatto nero (The Black Cat)
1910–1911
Oil on canvas, 54.4 x 73 cm
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
Gino Severini was affiliated with the Italian Futurists, an avant-garde movement inspired by transformations in the urban landscape. In their quest for modernity, the Futurists depicted the speed and energy of the newly mechanized world of the early twentieth century. This painting was included in the first Futurist exhibition of 1912 in Paris, and its title links it to Le Chat Noir, a famous Paris cabaret. The scene represented is based on a story by Edgar Allan Poe about a drunkard who blinds and later kills his cat, an action that ultimately culminates in revenge by another cat. Severini isolates the most crucial and dramatic elements of the story – the wine glass and the cats’ piercing stare – giving the narrative elements a spatial simultaneity characteristic of the Futurists.
For the 1912 exhibition catalogue, Severini remarked that the inspiration for his composition came from a literary source: Edgar Allan Poe’s short story of the same title, published in 1843. Severini intended to depict “the sense of morbid oppression after reading the story,” which addresses the effects of alcoholism and feelings of guilt. The narrator in Poe’s story describes how his disease progressively altered his temper and personality, eventually even fatally affecting the relationship to his beloved pet cat Pluto.
Emphasizing the intensity of the narrator’s experience, Severini suspends the conventional space-time structure in his canvas. He isolates the most crucial and dramatic elements of the story – the wine glass and the cats’ piercing stares – and arranges the disparate narrative components concurrently across the picture plane. Abandoning any rational perspective, Severini creates a kaleidoscopic mosaic of individual brushstrokes that visually coalesce into a multitude of geometric shapes. Painted on a bare and unprimed canvas, this configuration of the abstracted forms further heightens the particular sense of immediacy. (NGC)
See also:
• Poe, Edgar Allan (1809-1849)