The Engineer's Mistress, c.1940

This work is a smaller version of a painting that Carlo Carrà originally executed in 1921. The artist’s claim that it was a study for the finished piece has been widely contested, despite his dating of it to 1920. It is now believed to be a much later reworking of the same motif, employing the feathery brushstrokes typical of Carrà’s work from the mid-1920s onward. With its depiction of a dislocated head surrounded by various ‘attributes’, the image has similarities with Carrà’s famous ‘anti-graceful’ work The Drunken Gentleman (1916).