CARLO CARRÀ 88 ITALIAN FUTU R I S M’S N OTO R I O U S LY PR O-WAR, NATI O NALI STI C VI EWS incubated within an ideology of youthful insouciance before World War I that later partially intersected with fascist politics of the interwar period. In praising the poetry of war, the movement’s founder and energetic leader Filippo Tommaso Marinetti espoused an aggressive militarism that was never outdone but was periodically equaled by similarly extreme positions taken by other members of the group.1 For futurist artist Carlo Carrà (1881–1966), as with numerous male avant-garde idealists in Italy and around Europe at the time, World War I initially signaled a set of positive developments: the possibilities that moribund cultural traditions might be overcome in a brief, ritual conflagration and that modernist creative genius could be heroically expressed and renewed. In June 1914, Carrà adopted a nationalistic tone, which sharpened further after the war’s outbreak in August and prior to Italy’s entry in May 1915. His interventionist position at this time was grounded in Italian irredentist claims for the territories of Istria, Trento, and Trieste, claims that were central to Italy’s diplomatic push against Austria-Hungary in late 1914 and that yielded the major pretext for declaring war the following spring. Such strident nationalism ended up being short-lived for Carrà, who, unlike many of his futurist colleagues, never volunteered for military duty, though he was later drafted and served briefly in early 1917. By 1915, he was already drifting away from futurist aesthetic ideals, and, while he never recanted his patriotic fervor, it is clear from his paintings, drawings, and writings that he was deeply affected by his traumatic wartime experiences. This momentous shift in Carrà’s works pointed away from bellicose exuberance and toward a more contemplative, conscientious approach. To appreciate the extent of Carrà’s transformation during World War I, it is useful to revisit the giddy early days of futurism. In early 1910, he responded enthusiastically to Marinetti’s audacious appeal to young artists to join a new cultural movement that could challenge the status quo of academic painting and counteract what they perceived to be the stultifying effects of classicism.2 Soon thereafter, Carrà signed the first futurist manifesto of painting, along with Umberto Boccioni and other painters, and he began participating in its radical aesthetic and political program. By early 1912, his noticeably more experimental artworks appeared in the futurist art exhibition at Gallerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris, which opened in February, before traveling to numerous venues around Europe until 1914. Although it would be difficult to encapsulate the variety of Carrà’s prewar artistic practices (painting, mixed-media collages, free-word poems, and manifestos), many of his visual works explored fragmented compositions in which accumulations of dislocated elements poised between divisionist strokes and cubist planes dissolved naturalistic contours into clusters of multisensory impressions. For futurist painters, visual experimentation offered one Carlo Carrà’s Conscience DAVID MATHER COLOR FIGURE 1. CARLO CARRÀ (ITALIAN, 1881–1966). Funeral of the Anarchist Galli, 1910–11, oil on canvas, 198.7 x 259.1 cm (78¼ x 102 in.). New York, The Museum of Modern Art. avenue for expressing radical social and political views, while sociopolitical disruption became an explicit theme in several significant futurist works. In Carrà’s Funeral of the Anarchist Galli (fig. 1), for example, a red coffin is held aloft during a funeral for the anarchist metalworker Angelo Galli, who died during a factory strike in May 1906.3 The painting presents a violent confrontation between mourning anarchists and mounted policemen, though historical accounts of this event detail a much less violent incident than the one Carrà depicts.4 This artwork’s visceral power derives from putting the viewer at the center of an agitated crowd.5 In the eerily backlit scene, a patchwork sky emits golden sunlight that grazes past partially legible figures but leaves others inscrutable amid the nervous press of bodies. Repetitive lines of force supply kinetic motion to the figures, even as the opposing camps remain difficult to distinguish precisely. The image plots multiple simultaneous trajectories; 89 90 Mather this visual confusion signals the indeterminacy endemic to unplanned action. By mapping out a situation that points to unpredictable outcomes that may or may not catalyze into tangible sociopolitical changes, the painting evokes and comments upon a prevalent myth of political and cultural radicalism: spontaneous revolution.6 Carrà’s painting of rebelliousness also conveys a dominant aspect of the futurists’ behavior overall: they focused on and sought out social conflict. Although this overt contentiousness made a certain sense within the Italian context, it played very differently in avant-garde Paris. In his 1946 autobiography, Gino Severini recounted the futurists’ activities from the perspective of an Italian living in Paris.7 Dismayed by the bellicose language and outrageous antics, he described the antagonism his countrymen felt toward the Parisian art world.8 This aggressive attitude particularly colored the futurists’ dealings with the cubists, who dismissed the Italians and their artworks as juvenile.9 If Severini thought this antagonism detracted from their artistic pursuits, it is quite likely his fellow futurists perceived their disruptiveness to be integral to their avant-garde practices, as a mode of aesthetic activism.10 This brashness would lead to numerous controversies both within futurism and with those outside the movement.11 A postcard to Carrà from his Paris-based acquaintance Sergei Jastrebzoff in May 1914 mentions his uneasiness with the direction of the movement and articulates the hope that Carrà would no longer be associated with futurism in six months, but rather that he would be working peacefully “without punches and without politics.”12 Written in a familiar tone of close confidence, this document suggests, albeit in its broken Italian, that Carrà had mentioned being dissatisfied with futurism before the beginning of the war. Another important artwork from this prewar period is Free-Word Painting!—!Patriotic Festival, which Carrà made in June 1914 after a period of unsuccessful socialist strikes across Italy called Red Week.13 Composed in layers of collaged and hand-drawn elements, the multidirectional forces represent a nationalistic gathering.14 Unmoored from the rules of syntax and usage, the intricate choreography of verbal-visual vectors resonates with signifiers of national pride: white lettering on a black ground spells out patriotic and monarchist chants (e.g., “Long live the king!”) that converge around the printed word Italy.15 Within the microclimates of the crowd — here music and festive song, there political slogans, and elsewhere onomatopoeic absurdity (e.g., “traaak tataraak”) — verbal and sonic cues interfere and overlap like wireless signals resonating through a cacophonous cityscape. With its references to militarism, this collage represents an ideological realignment: dissatisfied with failed socialist ideals, Carrà gravitated toward supporting the state and its military on the eve of August 1914. Soon after the war’s thunderous start, Carrà’s belief in a rejuvenated, heroic Italy manifested in the form of collages and writings strongly opposing Germany and Austria-Hungary and trumpeting the futurists’ support for France; a collection of his images, poems, diagrams, and essays (many new ones mixed with several reprints) were published in the spring of 1915 as the book Guerrapittura (Warpainting).16 In the hyperbolic rhetoric of his texts, the military conflict had become a battle between civilizations — French and Italian joie de vivre facing down German academicism and the Austro-Hungarian empire. In his collages, war-related articles CARLO CARRÀ B&W FIGURE 2. CARLO CARRÀ (ITALIAN, 1881–1966). War in the Adriatic, 1914–15. From Guerrapittura (Milan: Ed. Futurista di “Poesia,” 1915), 11. Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute. and imagery clipped from newspapers underlie the artist’s multivalent inscriptions of symbols, maps, diagrams, instructions, and cubist-inspired renderings. According to these quick episodic bursts, viewers are thrust into the action as artillerymen on the frontlines, as officers serving alongside a French general, as prisoners of war, and, from aerial perspectives, as Allied pilots battling the Germans over the Adriatic Sea (fig. 2). Writing to fellow futurist painter and writer Ardengo Soffici at the end of 1914, Carrà lamented feeling powerless and articulated his desire to participate in “the real war — made of blood and heroism,” though he expressed uncertainty about whether or not he would volunteer to fight, should Italy eventually intervene.17 These letters to Soffici illuminate the artist’s conflicted mindset: he was preoccupied with a struggle for relevance in his life and in his work while also deeply engrossed in the news emerging from the conflict’s two fronts. At the time he was making these wartime collages for his book, he described a condition of living “in plastic synthesis,” which had the effect of connecting his life and work directly to world events.18 A similar modernist-cum-militarist sentiment motivated his book’s concluding essay, “War and Art,” in which the author characterized the war as an engine of new sensibilities closely allied with, and even emerging directly from, the futurist movement.19 This 91 92 Mather pro-war, creative excitement would rapidly subside however, because Guerrapittura was his last discernibly futurist project. Once Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary in May 1915, Carrà declined to volunteer with many other futurists for a squadron of bicyclists that he deemed ridiculous and hardly befitting his idea of Italian heroism. During 1915 and 1916, he experimented with nonfuturist visual strategies, through which he sought a coherent, creative response to what became for him a spiritual crisis; this new approach prompted his estrangement from the other futurists, especially when he revisited Italian painters of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.20 In his 1943 autobiography, Carrà insisted his move away from futurism had not resulted from personal quarrels with any of the futurists; rather, he claimed it emerged from his own “struggle of conscience.”21 Such a dramatic turn away from avant-gardism and toward tradition had been predicted by writer and critic Giovanni Papini in early 1914, if only to condemn this regressive possibility outright.22 Consequently, after receiving a reproduction in the mail of a recent Carrà painting from late 1916, Soffici remained incredulous that Carrà had been willing “to renounce all of the most modern conclusions (all of futurism).”23 Even if he knew about his friend’s dissatisfaction with the direction of futurism (alluded to in Jastrebzoff ’s postcard), Soffici was not prepared for such a sweeping repudiation of modernist ideas.24 After being drafted in late 1916, Carrà was assigned to the 27th Infantry Regiment near Ferrara, arriving for duty just after the New Year. He encountered trying interpersonal difficulties with other members of his company, including his commander (to whom he unwisely gave a copy of Guerrapittura). The artist suffered from severe insomnia and then experienced a nervous breakdown.25 While recuperating in a military hospital in Ferrara from April to August 1917, he frequently met with the painter Giorgio de Chirico (and his brother Andrea, known as Alberto Savinio), who lived nearby and worked at that hospital after leaving wartime Paris. Together they began to make works following a new set of artistic principles, which came to define metaphysical painting. Many of Carrà’s works from this period — at the hospital and then following his military discharge in late 1917 — are substantially indebted to de Chirico’s visual style: faceless mannequins inhabit nondescript, claustrophobic interiors cluttered with everyday objects and punctuated by ominous shadows and darkened doorways. In Mother and Son (fig. 3), two dressmaker’s forms — one of which displays a boy’s sailor suit — occupy the foreground of a grey room, with shadows cast by a beach ball, an oversized die, a furnace, and a freestanding wall that contains a measuring chart to mark the child’s growth over time. Simultaneously removed from the action, under protective care, and thinking of playful activities, the subject of the painting marked the artist’s incremental separation from what he took to be the futurist-inspired war. Dispensing with avant-garde contentiousness from 1915, he had arrived by 1917 at what he described as “aesthetic conscience.”26 In carefully arranged tableaus of recreation, recollection, and make-believe, Carrà had found a kind of pictorial sanctuary — from war and futurism — within which to refocus his passion for crafting images. Alongside his aforementioned reappraisal of historical painting, Carrà espoused the evocative power of ordinary things, such as those appearing in his compositions as CARLO CARRÀ COLOR FIGURE 3. CARLO CARRÀ (ITALIAN, 1881–1966). Mother and Son, 1917, oil on canvas, 99 x 59 cm (39 x 23¼ in.). Milan, Pinacoteca di Brera. 93 COLOR FIGURE 4. CARLO CARRÀ (ITALIAN, 1881–1966). Sails in the Harbor, 1923, oil on canvas, 00 x 00 cm (00 x 00 in.). Florence, Fondazione di Studi di Storia dell’Arte Roberto Longhi. generic shapes located in architectural spaces or else as symbolic visual forms reified by personal memories.27 In formal terms, his oeuvre began to emphasize cohesive contour lines around objects and symbols, and these contour lines functioned to contain those energetic forces that had been unleashed by futurism. Although this visual tendency marked a notable change from his mature futurist style, which included his studied, architectonic response to cubism (circa 1912–13), the frank simplicity of these visual contours was already prefigured in his prewar sketches Ballerina (1913) and The Trapeze Artist (1913) and in the cheerfully resonant painting The Child Prodigy (1914). What signified for Soffici the disavowal of modernist beliefs might otherwise communicate the reassertion of one aspect of Carrà’s earlier style, which was greatly deemphasized in his most successful futurist efforts. After the war, Carrà continued to pursue metaphysical painting until approximately 1922, when his style gravitated toward simplified, thickset figures within landscapes, seascapes, and other pastoral scenes, which the artist continued to paint well into the post–World War II period. Unable to completely abandon his futurist past, he periodically referred to himself as “an independent futurist,” though he had charted an entirely different course from 1915. In his haunting Sails in the Harbor (fig. 4), no human or animal figures occupy the stark vantage onto the Ligurian Sea. Illustrating the visual restraint he practiced following his tumultuous futurist years, 94 Mather the composition delicately balances several opposing qualities: the vista’s openness and depth is interrupted by the closure and flatness of a protective seawall, while two small sailboats, themselves emblematic of movement and freedom, remain anchored safely at the port, with their loosely furled sails tracing sinuous curves against rectilinear forms. Echoing his prewar experience with futurism, Carrà initially considered World War I to be the culmination of futurist aesthetic activism, but his subsequent explorations of decidedly nonmodern rhythms of life — first in metaphysical tableaus, then in the folkloric subjects of his native land — amounted to an extensive reconsideration of those avant-gardist impulses. — NOTES — 1 Examples of Marinetti’s prewar texts involving militarism include the speech “The Necessity and Beauty of Violence” (1910), the manifesto “War, the Sole Cleanser of the World” (1911), and the poem Zang Tumb Tumb (1912). 2 Marinetti spoke at Teatro Lirico in Milan on 15 February 1910. 3 While the precise circumstances surrounding Galli’s death are unknown, it occurred when strikers entered a factory to confirm that all the workers had been allowed to participate in a citywide strike. Later, a factory foreman claimed he stabbed Galli strictly in self-defense. See William Valerio, “Boccioni’s Fist: Italian Futurism and the Construction of Fascist Modernism” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1996), 63–73, 85–91; and Oliver Shell, “Cleansing the Nation: Italian Art, Consumerism, and World War I” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1998), 21–35, 54–55n40. 4 According to journalistic accounts, the anarchists carrying the coffin into the cemetery tried to break through the line of mounted police to march to the historic center of Milan; after a brief scuffle but unable to pierce through, the marchers proceeded to the gravesite. See Valerio, “Boccioni’s Fist,” 50–96; and Oliver Shell, “Cleansing the Nation,” 21–29, 54–55. 5 In “The Exhibitors to the Public” (1912), the futurist painters prescribed putting the viewer at the center of the picture, exemplified by an image of a riot (obviously Carrà’s painting) that employed “sheaves of lines corresponding with all the conflicting forces.” Umberto Boccioni et al., “The Exhibitors to the Public,” in Exhibition of Works by the Italian Futurist Painters, exh. cat. (London: Sackville Gallery, 1912), 14. 6 The myth of spontaneous revolution permeates late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century literature and political thought — from Karl Marx, Georges Sorel, and Enrico Corradini to Marinetti and Walter Benjamin. 7 Gino Severini, The Life of a Painter (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995). 8 Summarizing the prewar period, he observes: “I always deeply regretted the erroneous Futurist feeling of antagonism, of competing with Paris and Cubism; it would have been more advantageous for them to function harmoniously” (trans. Jennifer Franchina). Severini, The Life of a Painter, 143. 9 According to Severini, Picasso always disliked the futurists’ discussions on painting. Severini, The Life of a Painter, 93. Also see Guillaume Apollinaire, “Chroniques d’art: Les futuristes,” Le Petit Bleu, 9 February 1912, reprinted in Guillaume Apollinaire, Apollinaire on Art: Essays and Reviews, 1902–1918 (New York: Viking, 1972); and Gertrude Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1933). 10 Marinetti first employed the term art-action (Italian: arte-action) in his book Guerra sola igiene del mondo (Milan: Edizione Futuriste di “Poesia,” 1915), in which he used this term to describe the integration of aesthetic tendencies with sociopolitical activities. 11 Among the futurists, Carrà took offense to a passage in Umberto Boccioni’s book Pittura scultura futurista (Milan: Edizioni Futuriste di “Poesia,” 1914), in which the author claimed Carrà’s idea to make odorous and vaporous paintings had been derived from Boccioni’s earlier idea to paint states of mind. In a letter to Marinetti dated 14 March 1914, Carrà expressed his reaction to the controversy: “I will tell you sincerely that Boccioni’s megalomania is truly beginning to preoccupy me.” See Marinetti correspondence and papers, 1886–1974, acc. no. 850702, box 2, folder 1, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. In addition, Boccioni disagreed with Robert Delaunay about the meaning of the term simultaneity; for Boccioni, the word connoted a frenzy of psychophysical activities, sometimes intertwined with memories, while Delaunay’s usage was modeled after Michel Eugène Chevreul’s theory of simultaneous contrasts, but with added spiritual connotations. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. 12 Postcard from Sergei Jastrebzoff to Carlo Carrà, postmarked 7 May 1914, Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Rovereto and Trento (CAR.I.74.1). 13 Shell offers an explanation of the relationship between Red Week and Carrà’s Free-Word Painting — Patriotic Festival (1914; Gianni Mattioli Collection, on extended loan to Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice), in “Cleansing the Nation,” 73–98. Also see Mario Visani, La settimana rossa (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1978). 14 According to Bohn, this image represents a historical event in Milan called Festa dello Statuo, which included a peaceful parade with military troops and marching bands. Willard Bohn, “Celebrating with Carlo Carrà: ‘Festa patriottica,’” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 57, no. 4 (1994): 670–81. 15 The most thorough description to date of this work and its reception is Lewis Kachur’s entry in Flavio Fergonzi’s The Mattioli Collection: Masterpieces of the Italian Avant-Garde (Milan: Skira, 2003), 204–15. 16 Carlo Carrà, Guerrapittura (Milan: Edizioni Futuriste di “Poesia,” 1915). 17 Carlo Carrà and Ardengo Soffici, Lettere 1913/1929, ed. Massimo Carrà and Vittorio Fagone (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1983), 69. See Carrà letters to Soffici dated 12 October and 21 November 1914, 64–65, 69–70. 18 Carrà and Soffici, Lettere 1913/1929, 69. 19 Carrà, Guerrapittura, 103. 20 Carlo Carrà, La mia vita (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1981), 118–19. 21 Carrà, La mia vita, 118–20. 22 In an article in Lacerba (“Il cerchio si chiude,” 15 February 1914), Papini portrayed the emergence of real-world elements in futurist works as a return to naturalism from avant-gardism. After Boccioni strongly disagreed in print, Papini replied (in “Cerchi aperti,” Lacerba, 15 March 1914) that, even in Boccioni’s works, Papini discerned “a tendency toward order (metaphysical, religious), toward stability,” which Papini, Soffici, and even Carrà considered repugnant. Art historian Kenneth Silver documents the “return to order” by avant-garde artists in France, which he identifies as appearing first in 1915. See Kenneth Silver, Esprit de corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914–1925 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989). 23 Soffici’s letter is dated 16 February 1917. See Carrà and Soffici, Lettere 1913/1929, 104. 24 In a letter to Soffici from October 1914, Carrà mentions his difficulties with Marinetti as well as his disenchantment with futurist “mediocrity.” Carrà and Soffici, Lettere 1913/1929, 64–65. 25 Carrà, La mia vita, 130–31. 26 Carrà, Pittura metafisica (Milan: Casa Editrice “il Balcone,” 1945, 2nd ed.), 95. 27 On this new approach, Carrà observed: “I try to penetrate the innermost intimacy of ordinary things, which are the last things to be conquered.” Carrà, “Il quadrante dello spirit,” Valori Plastici, 15 November 1918, 1. Elsewhere, he poetically refers to “the flash of ordinary things.” Carrà, Pittura metafisica, 201–11. CARLO CARRÀ 95