Thirst for the future

Carlo Carrà's career pivots spectacularly around the First World War. Before the war, this leading Italian painter was a crash-bang-wallop Futurist, intoxicated by modernity, anarchism and sensory excess; during and after the war he became the pallbearer of Italian art, his pictures increasingly austere and primitive, sparsely populated by brooding, statuesque figures.

At the Estorick Collection, 120 drawings and collages, and a handful of paintings, offer a useful, if inevitably tantalising, appetiser. Having started out as an interior decorator, Carrà (1881-1966) enrolled at art school in Milan, where he met the future Futurists, Boccioni and Russolo.

In 1910 he was a co-signatory of Marinetti's incendiary Manifesto of Futurist Painters, which called for a total rejection of the past. Carrà applied Cubist fragmentation and faceting to modern life subjects, displayed here by the somewhat jittery Boxer (1913). His most original Futurist pieces are his Words in Liberty (1915), exuberant explosions of words and images in which he urged Italy to intervene in the war. Even as these were being made, however, Carrà's art was deserting the Futurist, if not the Italian, cause. Consolidation replaced fragmentation.

Stolid but wonderfully pneumatic, Zeppelin-like figures and objects start bobbing up all over the place. The Flask (collage, 1915) is so pumped up you fear it will float away. Nearby is a glass, made of newspaper, which could easily blow away. Their flightiness makes you want to reach out and grab them all the more: rarely has an artwork made me feel so thirsty. Perhaps he was responding to the privations of war. The drink theme persists into the work he made under the influence of the metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico. Drunken Gentleman III (1916) is a toby-jug head precariously balanced on a narrow pedestal amid various still-life objects.

At heart, you sense that Carrà was a humourist. Thus it is hard to know how seriously to take his monumental fascist-period work, which looks over its shoulder to early Italian art. The Roman law-givers in his studies for a mural in Milan's Palace of Justice (late 1930s) are giants who seem to be suffering from a slight hangover.

Estorick Collection, 39a Canonbury Square, London N1. Until 20 January.