CARR, CARLO

born Feb. 11, 1881, Quargnento, Italy died April 13, 1966, Milan one of the most influential Italian painters of the first half of the 20th century, best known for his still lifes in the style of Metaphysical painting. Carr studied painting briefly at the Brera academy in Milan but was largely self-taught. In 1909 he met the poet Filippo Marinetti and the artist Umberto Boccioni, who converted him to Futurism, an aesthetic movement that exalted patriotism, modern technology, dynamism, and speed. Carr's The Funeral of the Anarchist Galli (1911; Museum of Modern Art, New York City) shows the dynamic action, power, and violence characteristic of the Futurists. With World War I the classic phase of Futurism ended and, although Carr's collage Patriotic Celebration, Free Word Painting (1914; Gianni Mattioli Foundation, Milan) is based on Futurist concepts, he soon began to paint in a style of greatly simplified realism. Lot's Daughters (1915), for example, is an attempt to recapture the solidity of form and the stillness of the 13th-century painter Giotto. This new style was crystallized in 1917 when he met the painter Giorgio De Chirico, who taught him to convey in his paintings the unsettling sense of life in everyday objects. Carr and De Chirico called their style pittura metafisica (Metaphysical painting), and their works of this period have a superficial similarity. In 1918 Carr broke with De Chirico and Metaphysical painting. Throughout the 1920s and '30s, he painted melancholy figurative works based on the monumental realism of the 15th-century Italian painter Masaccio. Through such moody but well-constructed works as Morning by the Sea (1928; Gianni Mattioli Foundation, Milan) and through his many years of teaching at the Milan Academy, he greatly influenced the course of Italian art between World Wars I and II.