Art of the 20th Century
Carlo Carra
Carlo Carra
(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). Carrà 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 Carrà 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 Carrà 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.
