A calm study, then Cubism breaks it open

There are, in a sense, two versions of this painting, and the gap between them is the whole story of how it got made. The first is a charcoal-and-pastel study Carrà drew in 1910, and the surprising thing about it is how orderly it is. It uses traditional, near one-point perspective, the old Renaissance trick of letting all the receding lines aim at a single vanishing point, so the scene sits in a deep, believable box of space, the way a stage set does. Carrà had come up through Divisionism, the Italian cousin of the French Pointillism, both build an image out of separate small strokes of pure, unmixed color and let the eye blend them at a distance. He knew how to make a calm, deep, well-mannered picture of a chaotic event. The 1910 study is exactly that.

It is also, by then, the wrong kind of picture for the man making it. By 1910 Carrà was a Futurist. He had put his name to the two founding documents of Futurist painting that year, the Manifesto of the Futurist Painters and the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting, alongside Umberto Boccioni, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla and Gino Severini. Futurism, the loud Milanese movement founded a year earlier by the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, worshipped speed, machines, crowds, energy, the modern city at full throttle, and, from its very first 1909 manifesto, it openly worshipped violence too, glorifying war and force as a kind of cleansing power. (Marinetti launched the whole thing with a manifesto on the front page of a Paris newspaper; he is the impresario behind the movement, not a hand on this particular canvas, so file him as background for now. We will have to come back to where he and his movement went.) A movement built on motion and force could not very well be content with a tidy one-point-perspective drawing of a riot.

What broke the picture open was a trip. In 1911 the Futurists went to Paris, and in Paris they got their first real look at Cubism, Picasso and Braque’s recent work, in which a single object is shattered into facets and shown from several angles at once, so the picture stops being a window onto a scene and becomes a built surface of interlocking planes. For a painter trying to put a riot on canvas, this was a gift. Carrà went home and rebuilt the painting from the study up. He fractured the figures the way Cubism had taught him, and then he did the thing that makes it Futurist rather than merely Cubist: he drove hard diagonal “lines of force” (in Italian, linee-forza) straight through the scene, sheaves of rays that cut across every body and bend the whole composition into one explosive surge.

Those lines of force were not decoration, and they were not a neutral tool either. They were the movement’s politics made visible. The Futurists’ own catalogue statement, written for their 1912 Paris exhibition, demanded that such force-lines must “encircle and involve the spectator so that he will… be forced to struggle himself with the persons in the picture.” That is the design brief for this canvas, and it is also a confession of what Futurism wanted from art: not to depict the riot but to put you in it, to deny you the safe spot outside the frame from which you would normally watch a painting. The exaltation of crowds, collision and energy was never just a way of arranging shapes; it was the same appetite for force that ran through the manifestos, turned into a method. A funeral that Carrà had been physically unable to stand outside of became a painting you are not allowed to stand outside of either. The chaos is the subject, and the structure is built to make the chaos reach out and grab you.