Carlo Carrà

Carlo Carrà in Paris, 1912

Carlo Dalmazzo Carrà [ˈkarlo karˈra] (born February 11, 1881 in Quargnento ( province of Alessandria ), † April 13, 1966 in Milan ) was an Italian painter and art writer . He is one of the founders of Italian futurism .

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futurism

From 1909 to 1916 Carlo Carrà was one of the driving artistic and programmatic forces and the 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 futuristic phase, the core of which was the years 1911 to 1913. It is characterized by intensive artistic reflection, preoccupation with 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 publications "La Voce" and "Lacerba." With the publication of La pittura dei suoni, rumori ed odori , Carrà also contributed his own manifesto on futurism in 1913. In addition, the monograph Guerrapittura was created in 1915 , 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 , because he did not find a permanent home in this movement. His dissatisfaction with the futuristic forms of expression grows, and personal differences within the group also play a role in this conflict. In 1915 the painter began to orient himself towards the Italian masters of the Trecento and Quattrocento , and he took Giotto in particular as a model.

Pittura Metafisica

During the war years he turned away from Futurism prematurely and turned to 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 of this style are the so-called Manichini , faceless wooden dolls. These can be seen as symbols for the alienated, disoriented people in the post-war period. From 1918 on the writing predominates; Carrà deals intensively with considerations of art theory. In this phase Carrà works for the Rome magazine Valori Plastici . His work Canale a Venezia , 1926, oil on panel, can be seen in the Museo Cantonale d'Arte in Lugano .

"Magical Realism"

In a third creative phase from 1921 onwards, Carrà finally found 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 became the epitome of the painting styles subsumed under the term Novecento should. From then on, the focus of Carrà's work was the landscape, and in turn the focus on the pictorial object (man, house, tree, boat, etc.), charged with solemn weight through simplification and isolation. This phase was the longest in the Carrà factory; it lasted essentially until his death in 1966.

Carlo Carrà participated in documenta 1 (1955) and documenta III in 1964 in Kassel .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Museo Cantonale d'Arte, Lugano: Carlo Carrà

Web links

• Carlo Carrà at Google Arts & Culture
• Literature by and about Carlo Carrà in the catalog of the German National Library
• Materials by and about Carlo Carrà in the documenta archive