(b Quarguento, Piedmont, 11 Feb 1881; d Milan, 13 April
1966).
Italian painter, critic and writer. He was apprenticed to a team of
decorators at the age of 12, after the death of his mother. His work took
him to Milan, London and Switzerland, as well as to the Exposition
Universelle in Paris in 1900. He visited museums, and in Milan in 1906 he
enrolled at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, studying under Cesare
Tallone. By 1908 he was arranging shows for the Famiglia Artistica, an
exhibiting group. He met Umberto Boccioni and Luigi Russolo, and together
they came to know Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and to write the Manifesto
dei pittori futuristi (1910). Carrą continued, however, to use the
technique of DIVISIONISM despite the radical rhetoric of Futurism. In an
attempt to find new inspiration Marinetti sent them to visit Paris in
autumn 1911, in preparation for the Futurist exhibition of 1912. Cubism
was a revelation, and in 1911 Carrą reworked a large canvas that he had
begun in 1910, the Funeral of the Anarchist Galli (New York, MOMA;
see fig.). He had witnessed the riot at the event in 1904. The crowd and
the mounted police converge in violently hatched red and black, as Carrą
attempted the Futurist aim to place the spectator at the centre of the
canvas. In the reworking he attempted to make the space more complex and
the lighting appear to emerge from within.
