Carrà, Carlo

* 11.02.1881 Quargnento - † 13.04.1966 Milan

biography

Carlo Dalmazzo Carrà (* 11 February 1881 in Quargnento (province of Alessandria); † 13 April 1966 in Milan) was an Italian painter and art writer. He is one of the founders of Italian Futurism. From 1909 to 1916 Carlo Carrà was one of the driving artistic and programmatic forces and main representative of Italian Futurism, whose "First Painting Group" he founded in 1910 together with Umberto Boccioni and Gino Severini. In February 1910 Carlo Carrà joined this movement with the publication of the Manifesto dei pittori futuristi. From then on, Carrà began his eventful Futurist phase, the core of which was the years 1911 to 1913. It is characterized by intensive artistic reflection, an interest in the theories of Futurism, and an extensive production of paintings, drawings, and writings. In his capacity as an essayist, Carrà wrote primarily for magazines of cultural life, especially for the Florence-based publications "La Voce" and "Lacerba." With the publication of La pittura dei suoni, rumori ed odori in 1913, Carrà also contributed his own manifesto on Futurism. In 1915, he also wrote the monograph Guerrapittura, which is a synthesis of political and aesthetic themes that preoccupied Carrà at the time. But as early as 1915, Carrà began to distance himself from Futurism, as he did not find a permanent home in this movement. His dissatisfaction with the Futurist forms of expression grew, and personal differences within the group also played a role in this conflict. In 1915, the painter began to orient himself towards the Italian masters of the Trecento and Quattrocento, taking Giotto as his role model in particular. During the war years, he turned away from Futurism prematurely and towards Pittura Metafisica, to which he contributed alongside Giorgio De Chirico from 1917 to 1921 as a painter of metaphysical interiors and still lifes. An important motif in this style are the so-called Manichini, faceless wooden dolls. These can be seen as a symbol of the alienated, disorientated people in the post-war period. From 1918 onwards, writing predominated; Carrà occupied himself intensively with art theory considerations. During this phase, Carrà worked for the Rome-based magazine Valori Plastici. In a third creative phase, starting in 1921, Carrà finally found his way to a classical Latin realism characterized by formal rigor, drawing on the reduced formal vocabulary of the early Florentine masters (Giotto and Masaccio), which in Italy in the 1920s was to become the epitome of the painting styles subsumed under the term Novecento. From then on, the focus of Carrà's work was the landscape, and at the center of this, in turn, the subject of the picture (person, house, tree, boat, etc.) charged with solemn significance through simplification and isolation. This phase was the longest in Carrà's work; it lasted essentially until his death in 1966. Carlo Carrà took part in documenta 1 (1955) and documenta III in 1964 in Kassel.