He studied at the Scuola Tecnica in Cortona until the age of fifteen, when he and a group of fellow-classmates were expelled from the entire Italian school system for the attempted theft of exam papers.

His formal art education ended after two years when his patron stopped his allowance, declaring, "I absolutely do not understand your lack of order.

There he met most of the rising artists of the period, befriending Amedeo Modigliani and occupying a studio next to those of Raoul Dufy, Georges Braque and Suzanne Valadon.

He knew most of the Parisian avant-garde, including Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Juan Gris, Pablo Picasso, Lugné-Poe and his theatrical circle, the poets Guillaume Apollinaire, Paul Fort, Max Jacob, and author Jules Romains.

Following a visit to Paris in 1911, the Italian Futurists adopted a sort of Cubism, which gave them a means of analysing energy in paintings and expressing dynamism.

[1] In his autobiography, written many years later, he records that the Futurists were pleased with the response to the exhibition at Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, but that influential critics, notably Apollinaire, mocked them for their pretensions, their ignorance of the main currents of modern art and their provincialism.

[4] In 1916 Severini departed from Futurism and painted several works in a naturalistic style inspired by his interest in early Renaissance art.

[5][6] By 1920 he was applying theories of classical balance based on the Golden Section to still lifes and figurative subjects from the traditional commedia dell'arte.

Works such as The Two Pulchinellas (1922) exemplify Severini's turn toward a more conservative, analytic type of painting, which nonetheless suggests metaphysical overtones.

In 1930 he took part in the Venice Biennale, exhibited in the Rome Quadrennials of 1931 and 1935, and in 1935 won the first prize for painting, with an entire room devoted to his work.

During this decade, he taught the Swiss printmaker Lill Tschudi, who had previously studied at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art.

He received commissions to decorate the offices of KLM in Rome and Alitalia in Paris and took part in the exhibition The Futurists, Balla - Severini 1912–1918 at the Rose Fried Gallery in New York.