Red coffin, black crowd, lines of force

The painting is big, about six and a half feet tall by eight and a half feet wide, a wide landscape canvas roughly the size of a garage door laid on its side. That width matters. A riot is a thing that spreads sideways, surging left and right across a street, and Carrà gave himself a frame shaped like the street. Stand back from it and the first impression is not of a scene at all. It is of an explosion of red and black, lit from inside, as if something had gone off in the middle of the canvas and you are seeing it at the instant of the blast.

Now find the one red thing. Up in the upper center, riding above everything on the mourners’ shoulders, is the single brightest, reddest passage in the picture: Galli’s coffin, a hot red mass that Carrà remembered as a heap of red carnations draped over the box. Here is the move that organizes the whole canvas: Carrà does not light the coffin, he makes the coffin the sourceof light. Red flares out of it and washes across the bodies below, the way the sun would in an ordinary picture. So on this canvas the dead man is not the still, sad center of a funeral. He is the hot core of an explosion. It is worth being clear-eyed about what that is: a real murdered young man, turned by the painter into a pictorial device, a light source. That coldness is Carrà’s choice, not the funeral’s, and your eye obeys it, it goes there first and keeps being pulled back.

Around and below the coffin, the crowd. Almost everyone is in anarchist black, and Carrà paints them not as a row of individual mourners but as a single dark, heaving mass, a churn of fractured backs and heads and arms that you read the way you read a real crowd, all at once and a little alarmed, never one face at a time. Pressing into that black mass from the left are the mounted police (the line that would not let the coffin through) and at the flashpoint, just left of the coffin, a horse rears up into the bodies while the figures nearest it bend backward away from the hooves. That rearing horse is the literal hinge of the painting, the exact spot where a funeral became a fight, and Carrà has set it close enough to the coffin that you take in the violence and the dead man in the same glance.

Look up, into the top third of the canvas, and the whole upper register bristles with hard black diagonals stabbing into the light, the lances of the police, the flag-poles and banner-staffs of the anarchists, and behind them the cranes of the factory district, the working city that all this is happening in front of. They are half real objects and half pure direction, a thicket of lines pointing every which way, and they keep the violence from settling: even the sky is full of weapons.

And then the thing that makes it Futurist rather than just a vivid riot picture: the lines of force. Light does not arrive in this painting from any one place. It bursts outward in sheaves of diagonal rays, a sunburst radiating from the coffin and the sky across the entire upper canvas, and crucially those rays cut through the figures they cross, slicing a shoulder here, splintering a head there, so that body and beam and banner are all made of the same fractured stuff. This is the single clearest fingerprint of the 1911 Cubist-charged rework sitting on top of the calmer 1910 drawing. Trace one of those rays with your eye and you will feel it do exactly what the Futurists wanted: it runs off the edge of the canvas, toward you, and pulls your attention into the brawl instead of letting it rest on a tidy scene.

Last, step in close, right up to the surface, and watch the people dissolve. Down in the central and lower zone the figures stop being separate, an arm runs into a back, a head passes through a shoulder, one body interpenetrates the next the way Cubism allowed. Carrà has fractured the crowd on purpose, so that the surge reads as one continuous motion rather than a count of mourners. That is why the funeral feels like a single enormous body convulsing in the street, red at its heart and black at its edges, with lances and light flying off it in every direction. Pull back out to six feet and the explosion reassembles. Walk in close and it comes apart in your hands. The whole argument of the painting (a funeral that was a battle, a crowd that was one animal, a dead man at the center of a blast) is made in red, in black, and in the crossing lines, with not one word of caption needed.