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Born: 1881

Died: 1966

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Summary of Carlo Carrà

Both as a visual artist and as co-author/author of two of the most major manifestos of the Italian Futurist movement, Carrà played a key role in the growth of the group. When World War I broke out, he left the Futurist movement and became a pioneer of Metaphysical Painting (Pittura Metafisica) with Giorgio de Chirico, which he used to create surreal interiors and city squares in his paintings. To be honest, though, his time in this movement was brief, and in the 1920s, his focus switched to realist subjects such gigantic people and naturalistic landscapes. Over the course of his time as a Milanese professor of painting (1941-1952), he developed a more open, almost impressionistic approach to brushwork that would later influence his mature style.

Carrà had an enormous impact on the Futurist concept of Dynamism. “The Painting of Sounds, Noises, and Smells” in 1913 formally introduced the group to the idea of synaesthesia, a perceptual phenomenon relating to the idea that exposure to one external stimuli (say, sound or scent), causes a corresponding image (say, color). Many in the Futurist community found it to be an energising and freeing concept to work with in their work.

Despite the fact that Giorgio de Chirico and Carrà co-founded Metaphysical Painting, art critic Lorenzo Berto referred to Carrà as the “ultimate protagonist” of the movement, with his work symbolising an endeavour to “paint the invisible.” In Carrà’s Metaphysical works, the use of ambiguous symbolic language, and the placement of items in dubious situations, was highly original and had a direct influence on the Surrealist movement.

It is thanks to Carrà’s concept of synaesthesia that modernism’s attitude toward colour has been shifted. There were many who considered colour a distraction from the essential subject of the artwork, such as those of the Cubists (as an example). Rethinking the role of colour was made possible by Carrà’s influence. Using colour as a means of expression, he and many who came after him were tasked with creating vibrant paintings that had a distinct and distinctive vitality to them.

from Metaphysical Painting to Strapaese, Carrà’s nationalistic and aesthetic ideals progressed (formed by Giorgio Morandi). While modernist innovation was scorned in favour of art that highlighted Italy’s rural identity, the Strapaese (“super country”) movement promoted nationalistic values and a streamlined aesthetic. To this end, Carrà turned Italian landscape painting into “poems full of space and visions” in his later years.

Biography of Carlo Carrà

Childhood

Little is known about Carlo Carrà’s childhood. Born in Quargnento in Piedmont, Northern Italy, at the age of seven, he had a love for drawing. By the time he was eighteen, he was traversing Europe painting murals and decorating pavilions at the Paris World Fair (Exposition Universelle) in 1889, when he was just twelve. When he first encountered the modern art movement in Paris, he was there. Renoir and Cézanne were two artists he was particularly enamoured with.

While in Paris, he also became familiar with the extreme political theories of Mikhail Bakunin and Karl Marx, two of the most prominent anarchists of the Russian Revolution. He subsequently continued his journey to London, where he resided for several months. At first sight of the paintings of English Romantic artist J.M.W. Turner in London, he decided to return to Italy to pursue a career in the arts, where he met exiled Italian anarchists who urged him to do so. They advised him to go to Milan, and in 1901 he did what they said.

Early Life

Carrà began his formal art education at Castello Sforzesco in 1903, when he attended the arts and crafts school, and in Milan in 1906, where he studied night sessions with the painter Cesare Tallone at the Accademia di Brera. He worked as an interior decorator during the day to help pay for his college education. Artists use Divisionism to deceive the viewer into believing that the picture is complete by placing colours near to one other on the canvas rather than blending them beforehand. This technique was taught to him in art school. Carrà’s imagination was opened to the potential of abstraction by the concept of Divisionism, which was a radical break from the realistic painting techniques that had preceded it” The Accademia di Brera was where Carrà stayed until 1908.

Filippo Marinetti and Umberto Boccioni invited Carrà to join them in a new movement they were developing in 1909, and the artist accepted their invitations to join in. With Boccioni, Luigi Russolo and Giacomo Balla he co-wrote the Manifesto of Futurist Painters in 1910. In the same year, he also signed the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting, the second in an unprecedentedly long sequence of manifestos for a modernist movement, with his name on it. The Futurists envisioned a world in which mass production, machines, and transportation, such as trains, automobiles, and aeroplanes, would be the norm, and they used their art to spread this vision. They also believed that nationalism, chaos, violent revolution, and the rise of the working class would be inevitable. Speed and motion were the driving force behind Futurist works that used a variety of techniques, including blurring and repetition of forms and styles influenced by Cubist geometric compositions.

Carrà’s 1910 painting Stazione A Milano was an early attempt at dynamism, according to Barcio’s analysis. When it comes to art, dynamism meant conveying a sense of movement, which in turn signified social and artistic advancement. Artist Barcio describes this piece as a “hive of activity surrounding a train station while a train is rolling in” in a statement. Representationally, the picture depicts human figures, although they are reduced to vague shapes. Light, smoke, and the approaching equipment are the most prominent features in this photograph. Humanity fades into the background as “beautiful industry blazes forth in a cloud of furious fire and smoke,” says the narrator. “

“While the Futurists focused on Dynamism, the Cubists were also trying to express an enhanced type of realism, one that encompassed several viewpoints on a single subject,” argues Barcio. Cubist art, in Carrà’s opinion, lacked life and dynamism. In his mind, Cubism was about stopping the world and painting it, but instead he wanted the world to continue moving while he captured the emotion of that movement in his paintings. Futurist leader Carrà himself stated: “We argue that our concept of perspective is the entire antithesis to any static perspective. It is dynamic and chaotic in application, resulting in a real mass of plastic feelings in the observer’s psyche. Among his earliest masterpieces, Funeral of the Anarchist Galli (I funerali del anarchico Galli), (1910-11), Carrà demonstrated impressive command of these methods by depicting a chaotic charge made up of anarchic people.

After the Paris exhibition of the Futurists in 1912, Carrà published his own manifesto entitled The Painting of Sounds, Noises and Smells, in which he wrote about the process of synaesthesia: “We Futurist painters maintain that sounds, noises and smells are incorporated in the expression of lines, volumes and colours just as lines, volumes and colours are incorporated in the architectural design of a musical work. As a result, our canvases will depict the plastic equivalents of the sounds, noises, and scents prevalent in theatres, music halls, cinemas, brothels, train stations, ports, garages, hospitals, and factories, for example. In spite of Marinetti’s de facto leadership of the movement, Carrà’s manifesto indicated that he was an influential member of the Futurist community.

Mid Life

Art is always in crisis, Carrà said, and Futurism was just one of those crises. He departed from the principles of Futurism around the onset of the First World War. During this period, his art become more academic and formal in nature. Inspired by children’s and other “outsider” art, he began painting simplified, realistic still lifes. During his time in the military, in 1917 he met Greek-Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico in a psychiatric hospital in Ferrara, who would go on to inspire the Surrealists greatly. Metaphysical Painting was the result of a collaboration between the two artists.

Carrà and de Chirico “helped to consolidate each other’s ideas; they founded the (ultimately short-lived) Metaphysical Art movement, its paintings typified by eerie, dream-like landscapes inspired by classical architecture and incongruous objects accented by perspectival trickery,” according to arts writer Matthew Rudman. Both artists worked in metaphysics, but Carrà’s was “less sinister” and more serene and joyful (even at times humorous). Carrà’s poetic and mystical interpretation of the aesthetics of Metaphysical Art in “Pittura Metafisica,” published in 1918, put an end to their involvement with the movement and their connection with it. Carrà’s fascination in Giotto’s work began to impact his painting in 1919, particularly in terms of its quiet and firmness, which he incorporated into his work. For Carrà, “more than anyone else had attained our justified desire to guide painting back to its core goals” was the work of French Post-Impressionist painter Henri Rousseau, whose work captured his heart as well.

Carrà began contributing to the Rome periodical Valori Plastici in 1921. (that published under the editorship of Mario Broglio between 1918 and 1922). No less than the organisation of travelling exhibitions like a 1921 tour of Germany, Valori Plastici was essential to the promotion of post-war Italian art abroad. Art historian Emanuele Greco claims that the magazine had a significant impact “A pivotal role in Europe’s aesthetic landscape following World War I. Innovative Italian artists such as Giorgio de Chirico (Carlo Carrà), Gigio Morandi, Alberto Savini, Arturo Martini (Arturo Martini) and Edita Walterown von Zur Muehlen (Edita Walterowna von Zur Muehlen) were featured in the exhibition.” “The magazine was a wonderful channel for the international expansion of Metaphysical painting, that took place when the artists more related to this school including Carrá outdistanced themselves from it in favour of a more naturalistic pictorial language,” says Greco. .

Carrá, who had been an anarchist in his early years, made a complete ideological U-turn and became a supporter of the fascist administration about this time. With sculptor Marino Marini and painters Arturo Martini and Felice Casorati, he became part of the Novecento Italiano movement, which, although never promoting propaganda, was associated to the fascists despite never promoting propaganda in its works (in fact the movement was rejected by many fascists who criticised its lack of political focus). It should be noted that in the 1920s, according to art historian Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco: “At the time, we could not forgive Italian fascism. In many respects, it was still a socialist government that had been elected to power at the time “As a matter of fact.

Late Life

During the early 1930s, Carrà’s evolving political and aesthetic ideals appeared again. He was an art critic for The Ambrosiano, a high-end Milanese daily, from 1926-34. He wrote about Neoclassicism. Giorgio Morandi, an Italian painter and printmaker, created the fascist Strapaese (“super nation”) group in the early 1930s. Their friendship was based on a similar love in Impressionism and Cubism, which they learned about via the Italian modern art newspaper, La Voce, while they were students at the University of Milan. Morandi’s myth is that he kept a low profile as Fascism raged around him, claims critic Xico Greenwald, and that he “created an own aesthetic vision, courageously defying modernism.” Morandi, on the other hand, had abandoned the Metaphysical School’s “arty pretensions” to embrace a style that “glorified Italy’s agrarian identity [and] exalted modesty and simplicity in art” like Carrà.

Reactionary ultra-nationalist political beliefs that were heavily influenced by fascism and aligned with the Neo-Classical concepts advocated by Mussolini’s dictatorship during the 1930’s have tarnished Carrà’s reputation. Critics and historians have effectively maligned his work because of these ties. The Thirties: The Arts in Italy Beyond Fascism,” a 2012 exhibition at Florence’s Palazzo Strozzi (in which Carrà was featured), was praised by art critic Alexander Rozhin for attempting to separate artworks from the objectionable supremacist worldviews of the artists.

While Carrà was still alive, he produced works that incorporated elements from the numerous movements in which he had been part as a young artist (namely Futurism, Metaphysical Art and Strapaese art). His tenure as a lecturer at Milan’s Brera Academy of Art from 1941 to 1952 corresponded with (more or less) the maturation of his painting style, which became looser and more reliant on daubed brushwork. Paintings such as Landscape in Versilia and Marina have an almost impressionistic feel.

When it came time for him to focus on a new experimentation in his final years, the Sorgente Group Foundation says that “the desire to be simply himself, completely detached from the various artistic currents, led him to focus his attention on a new experimentation: an idea where painting had to be the means of making visible his inner need to identify with nature with a tendency to abstraction, through the simple silent contemplation of a landscape.”

In 1966, Carrà died in Milan, Italy. The Monumental Cemetery of Milan is where he is buried. The sculptor Giacomo Manzu created a piece for his tomb.

Carrà was described by art historian Andreja Velimirovi as “one of the main creative wings behind the visual wonders of Italian Futurism and an influential artist who helped form one of the most important avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century.” Is it not true that Carrà was a driving factor behind the initial wave of Italian Futurism? He was joined by fellow artists like Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and others such as Gino Severini and Luigi Russolo. Carrà influenced the following generation of Italian Futurists, notably Fortunato Depero and Benedetta Cappa, through his work and writing.

“More than Futurism,” says Phillip Barcio, “maybe (Metaphysical Painting) was Carrà’s greatest legacy; the suggestion that abstraction may be reached by symbolic or conceptual means, putting objects in circumstances that challenge their meaning in an effort to create something new. “The [painted] target isn’t a target [but] an abstract symbol [was] a notion Jasper Johns would investigate decades later,” says Barcio of Carrà’s Metaphysical Muse (1917). Carrà pioneered concepts, visual vocabularies, and artistic movements that changed the face of European art. He contributed to many aspects of avant-garde societies, engraving his name as one of the most important authors of the early twentieth century. “Although he strayed away from visual concepts on a regular basis for the majority of his career, Carrà still managed to leave his mark within every movement he ever worked in.

Famous Art by Carlo Carrà

Funerale dell’Anarchico Galli (Funeral of the Anarchist Galli)

1910 – 1911

“Strident effects of contrasting colour, blinding light, distortions of perspective, and brushwork fuse figure and ground,” says art historian Christine Poggi of this picture. Carrà’s work is now regarded as a prototypical example of early Italian Futurist art. Galli was shot dead by police during the Italian General Strike of September 1904, an anarchist and labour organiser from Milan. This painting represents his funeral (a strike that was called by the Chambers of Labor as a response to the killing of many striking workers in previous strikes). Funerals for Galli were barred entry into the cemetery due to the government’s concern that attendees would turn the event into a political demonstration. As a result, anarchists and police engaged in a bloody shootout.

In front of me I saw the coffin, covered over and over with red carnations, which rocked threateningly back and forth on the shoulders of the bearers; I saw how the horses began to shy, how sticks and lances clashed, such that it seemed sooner or later that the coffin would fall to the ground and be trampled on by the horses. His painting depicts a casket, which is represented by the crimson figure in the centre. Although the chaotic composition has a variety of human forms, the painting is dominated by abstract linear brushstrokes, which can be regarded as “lines of motion,” a common feature in Futurist art. Several figures are shown waving black anarchist flags, evoking the Futurists’ emphasis on nationalism, revolution, and violent protest.

Simultaneità, La donna al balcone (Simultaneity, Woman on the Balcony)

1912

Carrà combines Cubism and Futurism in this piece. Figuratively, the image of a “lady on a balcony” is rendered in muted shades of grey, brown and yellow. According to arts journalist Phillip Barcio, “There are no many views in Carrà’s painting, which has a cubist feel to it. Instead, it makes use of Cubist shapes to depict motion. As an example of a comparable concept, consider Carrà’s 1913 work The Cyclist, which employs repetition and abstract Cubist forms to depict a bicycle racer in motion “For now.

Despite the fact that Carrà made friends with the Cubists in Paris in 1911, Carrà said Cubism lacked “vibration.” Barcio argues that Carrà “felt Cubism halted the world and painted it, whereas he wanted the world to continue moving while he captured the sensation of that movement on the canvas.”. Carrà remarked that he had a greater affinity for the Futurists “Our view of perspective, as Futurists, is the antithesis of any static view. Using it produces a true avalanche of plastic emotions in the mind of the spectator because it is dynamic and chaotic “.

Penelope

1917

A move from Futurism to Metaphysical Art is evident in Carrà’s Penelope, painted the same year that he met Giorgio de Chirico (which the two men developed in collaboration). On black-and-white checkerboard tiles in a small claustrophobic chamber, the figure of Penelope is comprised of geometric forms and fragmentary arrangement. In addition, the figure’s sections are “made of riveted machine components, fragmentary shapes intertwined in arcing lines,” as Matthew Rudman, an arts writer, describes it.

In contrast to Futurism, the figure of Penelope and her surroundings are immobile, rigid, and stable in this artwork. Penelope appears more like a model or statue, according to Rudman. Carrà’s Penelope exhibits the surrealist, simplicity, and artificiality that were hallmarks of de Chirico’s works, demonstrating the artist’s influence. When the Valori Plastici show went on tour in 1921, Penelope was one of the highlighted exhibits. The journal “presented metaphysical painting both as an innovative language of the avant-garde and as well as a language that followed the Italian aesthetic tradition [and] a purposeful move to communicate the language of Metaphysics to the public in diverse ways,” argues historian Emanuele Greco.

La Musa Metafisica (The Metaphysical Muse)

1917

Carrà was fully immersed in the Metaphysical Painting style with La Musa Metafisica. He incorporates a mannequin (a motif he takes from Giorgio de Chirico’s works) into this image. With a sports racket in her right hand, Carrà’s white, featureless mannequin stands on the left side of the frame, wearing a white pleated skirt and a white top and sweater. She carries a ball in her left hand. On her left is a board with a map of Greece and a target in the bottom-left corner, a painting of a dull metropolitan environment, and behind it, a tall conoid building made up of panels of green, yellow, black, and red. A cross hangs on the back wall of the small chamber, which has doors on the right and left sides and a cross on the rear wall.

Phillip Barcio, a commentator on the arts, believes that “Metaphysical Painting was the precursor to various abstract trends that followed. Carrà was striving to portray the invisible with this creative manner. He was attempting to arrive at a concept rather than depicting a specific object “, it is. He goes on to say “The surrealist movement of the 1920s owes a lot to the surrealist imagery found in Carrà’s Metaphysical Paintings. Perhaps most importantly, these paintings communicated abstraction through a formal symbolic language. It’s possible that Carrà’s greatest contribution to art is the idea that abstraction can be achieved by symbolic or conceptual means, putting objects in circumstances that challenge their meaning in an effort to create something new.

Il Figlio del Costruttore, (The Builder’s Son)

1917 – 1921

While Metaphysical Muse depicts an all-white figure, Carrà also shows an all-white young kid sporting white tennis racquet while holding an all-white ball in his left hand, much like the figure in Carrà’s earlier work. There is a brown rectangular box next to him, and a wooden pole is leaning on it. In the dimly lit, cramped space to the room’s right, a vertical white and red-striped banner or painting hangs. An open door can be seen behind the youngster, revealing nothing but a black, empty void.

Curator Ester Coen stated of this piece: “The lively vibrancy of futurist lines in Carrà’s work is replaced by solitary objects, fixed by an arcane, symbolic and mysterious vocabulary.” According to Matthew Rudman, a writer on the arts, Carrà’s “esoteric” paintings “were often shot through with dark overtones, whereas de Chirico’s metaphysical works were more serene and occasionally whimsical in their blending of materials”. Although the work, which at first glance appears to be nearly mundane, bears a “disorienting character, as the lighting and shadows are not consistent, generating a sense of alienation, and indeterminacy,” art writer Lorenzo Berto warns.

Le Figlie di Loth (Lot’s Daughters)

1919

As a painter, Carrà was inspired by the works of Massaccio and Giotto, who he called “the artist whose forms are nearest to our style of conceiving bodies in space.” One woman with a blue dress, appearing pregnant, stands in the arched doorway of a brown house; while the other woman kneels on the ground outside with her right arm outstretched, palm turned upward, and her left hand resting on her chest. Both women face each other in Lot’s Daughters. In front of her, a wooden pole (possibly a trekking staff) lies, and a slim brown dog stands between the two women, facing to the right, staring up at the one who kneels down. There are some rocky outcroppings and plants in the desert, as well as a circular building or roundhouse to be seen in the distance.

In both women’s eyes, there’s a longing in their eyes. Lot and his family attempt to flee the city of Sodom as it is being destroyed by God in the biblical story in Genesis. Only Lot and his daughters survived the catastrophe, and his wife was turned into a pillar of salt when she turned to look back at the devastation. In an effort to reproduce, the two daughters turned to incestuous relations with their father. It can thus be concluded that the women have shared shame for the sufferings they have through and the wicked acts they have performed, as can be seen in their sad looks

Veduta della Rotonda del Brunelleschi

1940

In the late 1920s, Carrà had finally landed on the style he would use for the rest of his life: realistic, thoughtful landscapes painted with delicate brushstrokes and a light palette of pastels. His paintings are sometimes seen as an attempt to “convert the countryside into a poem full of space and dreams” after his wartime traumas, but this is not universally accepted.

Commenting on this issue, the Sorgente Group Foundation says: “In 1940, Carrà captured this sight of the Rotonda del Brunelleschi, better known as the Florentine church of Santa Maria degli Angeli. Despite being in the middle of a city, the chapel is bathed in a rarefied atmosphere, with just the sound of birdsong to break the stillness. A place devoid of any indications of life, where only the same peace and quiet of its lovely rural landscapes or its silent seascapes reigns. It is a reminder that one might meet for metaphysical contemplation even in the midst of a hectic setting, such as a city’s core.

BULLET POINTED (SUMMARISED)

Best for Students and a Huge Time Saver

• Both as a visual artist and as co-author/author of two of the most major manifestos of the Italian Futurist movement, Carrà played a key role in the growth of the group.
• When World War I broke out, he left the Futurist movement and became a pioneer of Metaphysical Painting (Pittura Metafisica) with Giorgio de Chirico, which he used to create surreal interiors and city squares in his paintings.
• To be honest, though, his time in this movement was brief, and in the 1920s, his focus switched to realist subjects such gigantic people and naturalistic landscapes.
• Over the course of his time as a Milanese professor of painting (1941-1952), he developed a more open, almost impressionistic approach to brushwork that would later influence his mature style.
• Carrà had an enormous impact on the Futurist concept of Dynamism. “

• The Painting of Sounds, Noises, and Smells” in 1913 formally introduced the group to the idea of synaesthesia, a perceptual phenomenon relating to the idea that exposure to one external stimuli (say, sound or scent), causes a corresponding image (say, color).
• Many in the Futurist community found it to be an energising and freeing concept to work with in their work.
• Despite the fact that Giorgio de Chirico and Carrà co-founded Metaphysical Painting, art critic Lorenzo Berto referred to Carrà as the “ultimate protagonist” of the movement, with his work symbolising an endeavour to “paint the invisible.”
• In Carrà’s Metaphysical works, the use of ambiguous symbolic language, and the placement of items in dubious situations, was highly original and had a direct influence on the Surrealist movement.
• It is thanks to Carrà’s concept of synaesthesia that modernism’s attitude toward colour has been shifted.
• There were many who considered colour a distraction from the essential subject of the artwork, such as those of the Cubists (as an example).

• Rethinking the role of colour was made possible by Carrà’s influence.
• Using colour as a means of expression, he and many who came after him were tasked with creating vibrant paintings that had a distinct and distinctive vitality to them.from Metaphysical Painting to Strapaese, Carrà’s nationalistic and aesthetic ideals progressed (formed by Giorgio Morandi).
• Biography of Carlo Carrà ChildhoodLittle is known about Carlo Carrà’s childhood.
• Born in Quargnento in Piedmont, Northern Italy, at the age of seven, he had a love for drawing.
• By the time he was eighteen, he was traversing Europe painting murals and decorating pavilions at the Paris World Fair (Exposition Universelle) in 1889, when he was just twelve.
• When he first encountered the modern art movement in Paris, he was there.
• Renoir and Cézanne were two artists he was particularly enamoured with.

• While in Paris, he also became familiar with the extreme political theories of Mikhail Bakunin and Karl Marx, two of the most prominent anarchists of the Russian Revolution.
• He subsequently continued his journey to London, where he resided for several months.
• At first sight of the paintings of English Romantic artist J.M.W. Turner in London, he decided to return to Italy to pursue a career in the arts, where he met exiled Italian anarchists who urged him to do so.
• They advised him to go to Milan, and in 1901 he did what they said.
• Early LifeCarrà began his formal art education at Castello Sforzesco in 1903, when he attended the arts and crafts school, and in Milan in 1906, where he studied night sessions with the painter Cesare Tallone at the Accademia di Brera.
• He worked as an interior decorator during the day to help pay for his college education.
• Artists use Divisionism to deceive the viewer into believing that the picture is complete by placing colours near to one other on the canvas rather than blending them beforehand.
• This technique was taught to him in art school.

• Carrà’s imagination was opened to the potential of abstraction by the concept of Divisionism, which was a radical break from the realistic painting techniques that had preceded it” The Accademia di Brera was where Carrà stayed until 1908.
• Filippo Marinetti and Umberto Boccioni invited Carrà to join them in a new movement they were developing in 1909, and the artist accepted their invitations to join in.
• With Boccioni, Luigi Russolo and Giacomo Balla he co-wrote the Manifesto of Futurist Painters in 1910.
• In the same year, he also signed the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting, the second in an unprecedentedly long sequence of manifestos for a modernist movement, with his name on it.
• The Futurists envisioned a world in which mass production, machines, and transportation, such as trains, automobiles, and aeroplanes, would be the norm, and they used their art to spread this vision.
• They also believed that nationalism, chaos, violent revolution, and the rise of the working class would be inevitable.
• Speed and motion were the driving force behind Futurist works that used a variety of techniques, including blurring and repetition of forms and styles influenced by Cubist geometric compositions.
• Carrà’s 1910 painting Stazione A Milano was an early attempt at dynamism, according to Barcio’s analysis.

• When it comes to art, dynamism meant conveying a sense of movement, which in turn signified social and artistic advancement.
• Artist Barcio describes this piece as a “hive of activity surrounding a train station while a train is rolling in” in a statement.
• Representationally, the picture depicts human figures, although they are reduced to vague shapes.
• Light, smoke, and the approaching equipment are the most prominent features in this photograph.
• Humanity fades into the background as “beautiful industry blazes forth in a cloud of furious fire and smoke,” says the narrator. “
• “While the Futurists focused on Dynamism, the Cubists were also trying to express an enhanced type of realism, one that encompassed several viewpoints on a single subject,” argues Barcio.
• Cubist art, in Carrà’s opinion, lacked life and dynamism.
• In his mind, Cubism was about stopping the world and painting it, but instead he wanted the world to continue moving while he captured the emotion of that movement in his paintings.
• Futurist leader Carrà himself stated: “We argue that our concept of perspective is the entire antithesis to any static perspective.
• It is dynamic and chaotic in application, resulting in a real mass of plastic feelings in the observer’s psyche.

• Among his earliest masterpieces, Funeral of the Anarchist Galli (I funerali del anarchico Galli), (1910-11), Carrà demonstrated impressive command of these methods by depicting a chaotic charge made up of anarchic people.
• After the Paris exhibition of the Futurists in 1912, Carrà published his own manifesto entitled The Painting of Sounds, Noises and Smells, in which he wrote about the process of synaesthesia: “We Futurist painters maintain that sounds, noises and smells are incorporated in the expression of lines, volumes and colours just as lines, volumes and colours are incorporated in the architectural design of a musical work.
• As a result, our canvases will depict the plastic equivalents of the sounds, noises, and scents prevalent in theatres, music halls, cinemas, brothels, train stations, ports, garages, hospitals, and factories, for example.
• In spite of Marinetti’s de facto leadership of the movement, Carrà’s manifesto indicated that he was an influential member of the Futurist community.

• Mid LifeArt is always in crisis, Carrà said, and Futurism was just one of those crises.
• He departed from the principles of Futurism around the onset of the First World War.
• During this period, his art become more academic and formal in nature.
• Inspired by children’s and other “outsider” art, he began painting simplified, realistic still lifes.
• During his time in the military, in 1917 he met Greek-Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico in a psychiatric hospital in Ferrara, who would go on to inspire the Surrealists greatly.
• Carrà and de Chirico “helped to consolidate each other’s ideas; they founded the (ultimately short-lived) Metaphysical Art movement, its paintings typified by eerie, dream-like landscapes inspired by classical architecture and incongruous objects accented by perspectival trickery,” according to arts writer Matthew Rudman.
• Both artists worked in metaphysics, but Carrà’s was “less sinister” and more serene and joyful (even at times humorous).
• Carrà’s poetic and mystical interpretation of the aesthetics of Metaphysical Art in “Pittura Metafisica,” published in 1918, put an end to their involvement with the movement and their connection with it.
• Carrà’s fascination in Giotto’s work began to impact his painting in 1919, particularly in terms of its quiet and firmness, which he incorporated into his work.

• For Carrà, “more than anyone else had attained our justified desire to guide painting back to its core goals” was the work of French Post-Impressionist painter Henri Rousseau, whose work captured his heart as well.
• Carrà began contributing to the Rome periodical Valori Plastici in 1921. (
• that published under the editorship of Mario Broglio between 1918 and 1922).
• No less than the organisation of travelling exhibitions like a 1921 tour of Germany, Valori Plastici was essential to the promotion of post-war Italian art abroad.
• Art historian Emanuele Greco claims that the magazine had a significant impact “A pivotal role in Europe’s aesthetic landscape following World War I. Innovative Italian artists such as Giorgio de Chirico (Carlo Carrà), Gigio Morandi, Alberto Savini, Arturo Martini (Arturo Martini) and Edita Walterown von Zur Muehlen (Edita Walterowna von Zur Muehlen) were featured in the exhibition.” “
• The magazine was a wonderful channel for the international expansion of Metaphysical painting, that took place when the artists more related to this school including Carrá outdistanced themselves from it in favour of a more naturalistic pictorial language,” says Greco. .

• Carrá, who had been an anarchist in his early years, made a complete ideological U-turn and became a supporter of the fascist administration about this time.
• With sculptor Marino Marini and painters Arturo Martini and Felice Casorati, he became part of the Novecento Italiano movement, which, although never promoting propaganda, was associated to the fascists despite never promoting propaganda in its works (in fact the movement was rejected by many fascists who criticised its lack of political focus).
• It should be noted that in the 1920s, according to art historian Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco: “At the time, we could not forgive Italian fascism.
• In many respects, it was still a socialist government that had been elected to power at the time “As a matter of fact.
• Late LifeDuring the early 1930s, Carrà’s evolving political and aesthetic ideals appeared again.
• He was an art critic for The Ambrosiano, a high-end Milanese daily, from 1926-34.
• He wrote about Neoclassicism.

• Giorgio Morandi, an Italian painter and printmaker, created the fascist Strapaese (“super nation”) group in the early 1930s.
• Their friendship was based on a similar love in Impressionism and Cubism, which they learned about via the Italian modern art newspaper, La Voce, while they were students at the University of Milan.
• Morandi’s myth is that he kept a low profile as Fascism raged around him, claims critic Xico Greenwald, and that he “created an own aesthetic vision, courageously defying modernism.”
• Morandi, on the other hand, had abandoned the Metaphysical School’s “arty pretensions” to embrace a style that “glorified Italy’s agrarian identity [and] exalted modesty and simplicity in art” like Carrà.
• Reactionary ultra-nationalist political beliefs that were heavily influenced by fascism and aligned with the Neo-Classical concepts advocated by Mussolini’s dictatorship during the 1930’s have tarnished Carrà’s reputation.
• Critics and historians have effectively maligned his work because of these ties.

• The Thirties: The Arts in Italy Beyond Fascism,” a 2012 exhibition at Florence’s Palazzo Strozzi (in which Carrà was featured), was praised by art critic Alexander Rozhin for attempting to separate artworks from the objectionable supremacist worldviews of the artists.
• While Carrà was still alive, he produced works that incorporated elements from the numerous movements in which he had been part as a young artist (namely Futurism, Metaphysical Art and Strapaese art).
• His tenure as a lecturer at Milan’s Brera Academy of Art from 1941 to 1952 corresponded with (more or less) the maturation of his painting style, which became looser and more reliant on daubed brushwork.
• Paintings such as Landscape in Versilia and Marina have an almost impressionistic feel.
• When it came time for him to focus on a new experimentation in his final years, the Sorgente Group Foundation says that “the desire to be simply himself, completely detached from the various artistic currents, led him to focus his attention on a new experimentation: an idea where painting had to be the means of making visible his inner need to identify with nature with a tendency to abstraction, through the simple silent contemplation of a landscape.
• “In 1966, Carrà died in Milan, Italy.

• The Monumental Cemetery of Milan is where he is buried.
• The sculptor Giacomo Manzu created a piece for his tomb.
• Carrà was described by art historian Andreja Velimirovi as “one of the main creative wings behind the visual wonders of Italian Futurism and an influential artist who helped form one of the most important avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century.”
• Is it not true that Carrà was a driving factor behind the initial wave of Italian Futurism?
• He was joined by fellow artists like Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and others such as Gino Severini and Luigi Russolo.
• Carrà influenced the following generation of Italian Futurists, notably Fortunato Depero and Benedetta Cappa, through his work and writing.
• “More than Futurism,” says Phillip Barcio, “maybe (Metaphysical Painting) was Carrà’s greatest legacy; the suggestion that abstraction may be reached by symbolic or conceptual means, putting objects in circumstances that challenge their meaning in an effort to create something new. “

• The painted target isn’t a target but an abstract symbol was a notion Jasper Johns would investigate decades later,” says Barcio of Carrà’s Metaphysical Muse (1917).
• Carrà pioneered concepts, visual vocabularies, and artistic movements that changed the face of European art.
• He contributed to many aspects of avant-garde societies, engraving his name as one of the most important authors of the early twentieth century. “
• Although he strayed away from visual concepts on a regular basis for the majority of his career, Carrà still managed to leave his mark within every movement he ever worked in.

Information Citations

En.wikipedia.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/.