Background
Carlo Carrà was born on February 11, 1881, in Quargnento, Province of Alessandria, Piedmont, Italy.
Carlo Carrà was born on February 11, 1881, in Quargnento, Province of Alessandria, Piedmont, Italy.
At the age of twelve, Carlo Carrà worked as a mural decorator. In 1899 – 1900, he was in Paris decorating pavilions at the Exposition Universelle, where he became acquainted with contemporary French art. He then spent a few months in London in contact with exiled Italian anarchists, and returned to Milan in 1901. In 1906, Carlo Carrà enrolled at the Brera Academy (Accademia di Brera) there and studied under Cesare Tallone.
Carlo Carrà met Boccioni and Russolo in 1908 with whom he signed the Manifesto of Futurist Painters, and the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting. His radical political and artistic interests were combined in the monumental painting Funeral of the Anarchist Galli, which he reworked after a trip to Paris in the fall of 1911, when he came into direct contact with Cubism. With Ardengo Soffici, he contributed to the Futurist periodical Lacerba.
In 1914, Carrà came back in Paris where he met Apollinaire and Picasso. At that time, he started to work in the medium of collage and words-in-freedom, and endorsed the Italian Interventionist movement in his book Guerrapittura of 1915. By 1916, Carrà had rejected many of the nihilistic premises of Futurism. In 1917, he met Giorgio de Chirico in Ferrara and adapted his metaphysical iconography and compositional techniques to a series of still lifes and interiors.
In 1918, Carrà, de Chirico, and his brother Alberto Savinio joined the magazine Valori Plastici. The following year, he published his book Pittura metafisica, which celebrated the transcendent properties of pure form and commonplace objects.
Carrà theoretical position, grounded in a post-war "return to order," signaled his break with the classicism of de Chirico. After a short-lived phase of Magic Realism, by the mid-twenties, Carrà had evolved his mature style that combined archaizing figures with an atmospheric brushwork, redolent of nineteenth-century Impressionist Naturalism. In the 1920s, he participated in the two exhibitions of the Novecento italiano, and signed Mario Sironi's Manifesto of Mural Painting in 1933. In 1941 he was appointed a professor of painting at the Accademia di Brera. In 1945 he published his autobiography La mia vita.
Carlo Carrà was a highly influential Italian painter of the early 20th century. He was also known as a master of figurative painting. He was a respected teacher and a prolific art writer, who influenced generations of realist artists. He is best known for his futurist work, which is called The Funeral of the Anarchist Galli (1911).
(Autobiography)
