Paris, Berlin, and the fault line under the picture

The finished painting made its public debut not in Milan but in Paris, in February 1912, at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune. This was the Futurists’ landmark group exhibition, the show that introduced the Italians to the French avant-garde (the experimental new art) organized with help from the critic Félix Fénéon, the same sharp-eyed dealer-critic who turns up all over this period of modern art. Carrà’s riot, hung in Paris a year after Paris had handed him the Cubism that rebuilt it, went out into the world.

From there the canvas took the route a lot of early modern art took, which runs through Germany. By later in 1912 it had been bought in Berlin through Galerie Der Sturm, the gallery of Herwarth Walden, who was to German modernism roughly what an evangelist is to a faith, the man tirelessly putting the new art in front of new audiences. It passed into the German collection of Franz Kluxen, back through Walden’s Der Sturm, and then in 1920 to the artist-collector Paul Citroen in Holland, who held it for nearly thirty years.

In 1948 it crossed to New York, to the Museum of Modern Art, acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest, by exchange, meaning MoMA traded other works for it rather than paying cash, the same quiet mechanism that brought the museum its Starry Night. It hangs there still, and it is at MoMA that the painting picked up its most durable reading. That reading came from Alfred H. Barr Jr., MoMA’s founding director and one of the people who effectively wrote the standard story of modern art in the twentieth century. Barr looked at all that red-and-black chaos and saw, underneath it, something almost paradoxically calm. He called the painting “as classically organized as a fifteenth-century battle piece by Paolo Uccello,” likening it to Uccello’s famous Battle of San Romano, the Renaissance war picture in which a tangle of lances and rearing horses is in fact pinned to a strict, almost geometric order. Keep that labeled as Barr’s observation rather than the artist’s stated plan; the scholar Rosalind McKever has since argued Carrà likely did know the Uccello. The point that lands is the one Barr was making: the riot only lookslike pure pandemonium. Hold the canvas at arm’s length and you can feel the diagonals bracing each other, the explosion held in a frame as taut as an old master’s.

There is a harder thing to say about this painting, though, and it is worth saying plainly. In 1906 Carrà meant it. He was an anarchist, he was in that crowd, and the grief on the canvas is real. But the movement whose language he used to paint it did not stay where it started. Futurism, from its first 1909 manifesto, had openly glorified violence and war as a kind of cleansing energy, and its founder, Marinetti, went on to help launch Italian Fascism, founding a Futurist political party, folding it into Mussolini’s movement, and co-writing the 1919 Fascist Manifesto. Carrà himself made the same turn.The young anarchist of 1906 became an ultranationalist around the First World War and then a supporter of the Fascist-era order, lending his name in the 1930s to art in the service of the state. So the picture sits on a fault line. It is a sincere monument to a murdered worker, painted in the idiom of a movement that would soon supply the aesthetics of the very nationalism that crushed movements like Galli’s. Both halves are true, and the painting is more honest, not less, once you hold them at the same time. That is finally the trick of it: Carrà took the most disordered thing he had ever lived through and gave it a structure, and the structure outlasted the politics that he and his movement carried into much darker rooms. It is why a street fight from 1906 still stops you a century on, and why it should also unsettle you.