Carlo Carrà: Metaphysical for a Moment

Carlo Carrà - Western Horseman - 1917 - Oil on canvas - 52 x 67 cm - Private CollectionItalian painter Carlo Carrá (1881-1966) was a leading figure of the Futurist movement that flourished in Italy during the beginning of the 20th century. In addition to his many paintings, he wrote a number of books concerning art and he taught for many years in the city of Milan. 

In 1917 he met Giorgio de Chirico in Ferrara, and worked with him there for several weeks. Influenced by de Chirico, Carrà began including mannequin imagery in his paintings, and together they formed the short-lived “Metaphysical Art Movement”. The work featured here is one of Carrà’s metaphysical works. The movement broke up over a dispute between de Chirico and Carrà over who exactly established it. Ah…the ego of some artists!

By 1919, Carrà's metaphysical phase was giving way to an “archaicism” inspired by the works of Giotto, whom he admired as "the artist whose forms are closest to our manner of conceiving the construction of bodies in space.” However, Carrà is best known for his Futurist works.

Giorgio de Chirico: An Artist of Enigmas

Giorgio de Chirico - The Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon - 1910 - Oil on canvas - 45 x 60 cm - Peggy Guggenheim Collection - Venice (click photo for larger image)Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) was a pioneer in the widespread revival of Classicism that took place in Europe, during the 1920s. His classically inspired pictures of empty town squares are the art for which he is best known. It was the work styled in this fashion that led him to form the short-lived Metaphysical Art movement, along with the painter Carlo Carrà.

In The Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon, long, sinister, and illogical shadows cast by unseen objects onto empty city spaces contrast starkly with the bright, clear light that is rendered in brooding green tonalities.” This was the first painting in what is known as the Metaphysical Town Square series.

De Chirico’s metaphysical works attracted considerable notice, particularly in France, where the Surrealists championed him as a precursor. But the artist was more conservative than the Paris avant-garde. He later referred to his former supporters as "the leaders of modernistic imbecility.”