Carlo Carra
One of the most characteristic signs, common to all the trends in painting today – and one which makes the greatness of contemporary works of art – is without doubt the element of distortion which is the predominant factor in the construction of a painting.
Anyone who takes an intelligent interest in modern painting will know, anyway, that without the presence of this distorting element a work of art cannot exist.
The objective representation of things, so dear to the hearts of naturalists with their artistic collectivism, is henceforth confined to its legitimate field: photography.
The search for dynamic-plastic distortion in painting. The search for polytonal music without quadrature. The search for the art of sounds. The search for words-in-freedom.
We are happy to leave the job of explaining the meaning of these words to pedagogues; they are obscure only to idiots; they are crystal clear to anyone who has any familiarity with art.
Distortion is an altimeter which registers the degrees of plastic expression which a work of art can attain. Adjectives like ‘primitive’, ‘great’, etc., are too vague, indeterminate and elastic to be used unequivocally.
With such vague, amorphous terminology, anyone can call the most moronic and bourgeois painting in the world ‘primitive’ or ‘great’.
As usual the Italians do not know what has been happening in other countries for the past thirty years.
In the works of the old masters, including Giotto and Titian, any plastic element was the result of accidental intuition.
The plastic elements of their pictorial illustrations are to be found in the minor, unimportant sections of their paintings and have little significance for the artist; they are generally found only in the drapes, landscape backgrounds, etc.
And don’t throw in our faces the works of old stay-at-home Rembrandt, or El Greco, both of whom attempted some kind of formal distortion, which, however, was ruined by filthy literary psychology.
Such attempts at formal and psychological-literary distortion must be disowned by us Futurists with vigour. Forms executed in an inert and static way, derived from concepts far remote from any real feeling for life, the works of these old painters should be completely struck off our lists of objects worthy of preservation; they should be removed from the sight of everyone still uncontaminated by stupid idolatry, everyone who wants to become a real art lover.
Once more we return to the miraculous Bruno [sic] Courbet – the first plastic artist to refuse to have any truck with millenarian moralism or romantic sentimentalism in his painting.
The three major Post-Impressionist painters, Matisse, Derain and Picasso, have continued the traditions of their three great predecessors Manet, Renoir and Cézanne, and the distortionist aspect of the problem of plasticity in painting came to be applied with courage and greater awareness.
To this group of artists is due the great credit of having brought to painting an anti-episodic constructional synthesis which was entirely unknown amongst the old painters.
They have broken with perspective schemes, they have broadened and deepened their experiments with space and the plasticity of bodies and light, distorting all apparent reality; in this way these great precursors prepared the way for Futurist painting.
The need for more and more architectural distortion of objects and things made the painter Courbet take a stand against:
The pictorial distortion of the kind practised in a linear-static way by the Egyptians, the Ancient Greeks, Michelangelo and El Greco.
With Courbet, for the first time, we have plastic distortion accompanied by the principles of dynamism. We must give him the honour of being the first innovator of modern painting.
All these things have been discussed at great length by myself, Soffici and our friend Picasso in the latter’s studio. Expounding our Futurist principles, we convinced Picasso of the necessity of starting – as far as distortion is concerned – with a passionate acceptance of modernity, as well as of popular art. We also showed him the absurdity of the kind of distortion which can take inspiration from a bygone sensibility inevitably static and false. This kind of distortion can only create works which have merely the appearance of modernity, where the life is merely illusory.
Our dynamic distortion in painting will be used to fight: Any tendency towards the ‘pretty’, the ‘tender’, ‘the sentimental’ (BOTTICELLI, WATTEAU)
Any tendency towards ‘literary heroicism’ (DELACROIX)
Any tendency towards the ‘bourgeois’ or the ‘academic’ (RAPHAEL, LEONARDO DA VINCI)
Any tendency towards ‘harmony’, ‘equilibrium’, ‘symmetry’, the ‘decorative’, ‘pure illustrationism’ (VERONESE)
Any tendency towards the ‘analytical’, towards ‘scientific or rationalist perspective’, towards ‘objectivism and natural probability’ (SEURAT, SIGNAC, GROS)
While the paintings of our glorious predecessors, Courbet, Manet, Cézanne and Renoir, exhibit a certain fragmentariness, nevertheless their work was the signal for a rebellion against all gangrenous, millenarian, artistic traditionalism.
The artistic revolt begun by these painters will be brought to full fruit by us Futurist painters, and this new art, barely glimpsed by them, will be realized by US for our own pleasure and for the pleasure of a few like-minded people who find themselves capable of enjoying it.
Carlo Carrà (1915)
