THE OVERNIGHT GUEST
Carlo Carrà, Chronicle of a Milanese Night Owl, 1914
The poet-painter Carlo Carrà traveled to Paris as part of a delegation of Italian Futurists in 1914. The French poet Guillaume Apollinaire put him up in the offices of his review Les Soirées de Paris, and the two saw each other almost every day. (Apollinaire even managed to broker a gallery contract for the Italian with Picasso’s dealer Kahnweiler.) In quick succession, they began to create graphically innovative free verse—Apollinaire the first calligramme, Carrà parole in libertà, seen above.
