"Chaos and Classicism" at the Guggenheim

The Engineer's Mistress, Carlo Carra, 1921
Before the war, Carra had been one of the Italian Futurists, painters who idolized speed, motion and violence. After the war he turned his back on "ecstatic rotations of color...trivial and trembling mobility and tumultuous surfaces." He looked instead to classical antiquity for inspiration and stressed the importance of art as a way to build the future, not explode it. So in this picture Carra represents himself by the engineer's compass and triangle hanging at right, while his new wife Ines appears as an enduring marble bust.

• Picasso at the Metropolitan Museum of Art