Carlo Carrà: Futurist
Monday, October 7, 2013 at 11:10AM 
Carlo Carrà - Jolts of a Cab - 1911 - Oil on canvas - 20 5/8 x 26 1/2" (52.3 x 67.1 cm) - Gift of Herbert and Nannette Rothschild - Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) - New YorkCarlo Carrà (1881-1966) was an Italian painter, critic and writer who was a prominent figure in the early 20th century movement of Futurism. His own words reveal a great deal about the character of his day.
“But that was the Golden Age of modern art. We were still a small group of pioneers, the Paris Cubists and Fauvists, the Italian Futurists, the London Vorticists, the Blue Rider group in Munich, the Expressionists in Berlin and Dresden, Larionov and his friends in Russia. Nationalism was quite unknown to us, and we were all friends, each ready to recommend the others to the few gallery owners, collectors and critics likely to be interested in our work.
"After the First World War, we found ourselves committed in each country to an absurd patriotism. It had become unpatriotic for a Paris painter, even if he were foreign-born, to know anything about contemporary German art or to praise an Italian artist. Overnight, Picasso seemed to have forgotten all about Kandinsky, Chagall behaved as if he had never heard of Larionov, and only a few personal friends of mine in Paris could remember any of my pictures.”
Carlo Carrà, 1959, quoted by Edouard Roditi
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