Carlo Carrà

He was born in Quargnento in 1881 by a family of artisans. He earns himself living as a stuccoer and decorator first in Valenza Po, then in Milan, where he moved to 1895 and attended evening drawing courses. In 1900, in Paris, to collaborate in the decoration of the Halls of the Universal Exhibition, visit the Louvre and the modern collections of Luxembourg: in Memories it remembers the emotion experienced in front of Courbet, Pissarro, Renoir and Cézanne. Back in Italy, he attended the Milan Evening School of Applied Arts and in 1906, thanks to the economic aid of an uncle, he enrolled at the Accademia di Brera, where he is a student of Tallone and where he is able to meet young artists Among them Boccioni. With him he signed the "Manifesto of Futurist Painters" in 1910 and actively participates in the new movement: as a painter, regularly exhibiting exhibitions in Milan, Paris, Berlin and London; As a critic-writer, instead, publishing numerous interventions on Lacerba. In 1916, after a season of successful relations with the Cubists, he published Giovanni Papini's "La Voce" "Spoken on Giotto" and "Paolo Uccello Costruttore" in which he reflected on the Italian painting of the fourteenth and early fifteenth century as "exemplary" text For a renewed form study. Invited to the front in 1917 he was hospitalized at the military hospital in Ferrara, where he met De Pisis, Savinio and De Chirico and painted the first metaphysical paintings. Returning to Milan in 1919, he began an intense collaboration with the magazine "Valori Plastici" directed by Mario Broglio who published his essays and reproduced many of his works in the metaphysical period. With his stay in Liguria, Camogli in the summer of 1921, and later in Versilia at Forte dei Marmi, since 1923, he deepened the theme of the landscape, as through a return to reality. In the years between the two wars Carrà plays a protagonist, thanks also to the work of art critic on the Milanese newspaper "L'Ambrosiano" with which he collaborated since 1921: regularly present at exhibitions organized by the "Novecento" group, author of Frescoes for the Triennale of Milan (gone missing) and the Palace of Justice in 1938, painting professor at the Accademia di Brera since 1941. The forties and forties see him engaged in intense exhibition activity, culminating in a Anthological exhibition set up in 1962 at the Royal Palace in Milan.

Text © Monte dei Paschi di Siena, 2017