Carlo Carra Biography | Oil Painting Reproductions

Carlo Carra artistic talent was already demonstrated when at twelve years old when he was working as a mural painter. And at twenty-five, he enrolled in Milan's Accademia di Brera, studying under Cesare Tallone. His work of this time revealed the influence of Italian Divisionism, joined with the nineteenth-century Lombard Naturalism.

Carlo Carra met Boccioni and Russolo in 1908 with whom he signed the 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. In 1913, he painted The Red Horseman, this figure in motion has been dynamically decomposed like a sequence of movie frames. Carra threw himself into the Futurist experience, later becoming one of the founders of the Metaphysical Painting movement.

With Ardengo Soffici, Carlo Carrà contributed to the Futurist periodical Lacerba. In 1914, Carrà was again back in Paris where he met both Apollinaire and Picasso. By 1916, Carrà had rejected a significant number of the skeptical premises of Futurism.

Metaphysical Painting emerged from a chance meeting during World War I in a military hospital in Ferrera, where De Chirico, Savinio, Carra, and De Pisis were all patients at the same time. The meeting led to the development of an artistic and intellectual movement, that sought to represent stillness as opposed to the dynamic movement of Futurism. In 1917, after meeting Giorgio de Chirico in Ferrara he changed his approach and adapted de Chirico's metaphysical iconography and composition techniques to a progression of still lifes and interior oil paintings.

The Oval Of The Apparitions, the mannequin, a recurring figure in Metaphysical painting as well as in the surrealist literature, gives the idea of human presence, but as a soulless, mechanical form, incapable of motion or human expression. In 1918, Carrà and de Chirico joined the magazine Valori Plastici. The next year, he published his book Pittura Metafisica, which celebrated the otherworldly properties of unadulterated shapes and ordinary objects.

Carlo Carrà theoretical position, grounded in a postwar return to order, signaled his break with the classicism of de Chirico. After a brief period of Magic Realism, by the mid-twenties, Carrà had developed his mature style that combined figures in a different universe with an atmospheric brushwork. In the 1920s, he participated in the two exhibitions of the Novecento Italian 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.

Art Movement History: Futurism.
Artists Influencing Carlo Carra: Cesare Tallone, Giorgio de Chirico.
He Traveled To France, England.
Artist's Biography compiled by Albert L. Mansour at The World's Artist, with text adapted from Wikipedia.