Michael Carmichael Carr

Michael Carmichael Carr was born on June 25, 1881, in San Francisco, California. He attended the Slade School of Fine Arts at the University College London between 1899 and 1903, where he studied with painters Wilson Steer and Frederick Brown. Upon graduating, he married Catharina Elisabeth Voute, a young Dutch woman living in England, and moved with her to Bordighera, Italy.

In 1907, the Carrs were introduced to Edward Gordon Craig, an experimental artist and theater designer. Craig, along with other producers such as Adolphe Appia and Max Reindhart, were pioneers of a movement called The New Stagecraft at the beginning of the 20th century, which explored symbolism and abstraction in contrast to popular theater that strove for realism and historical accuracy.

Michael and Catharina Carr moved to Florence to help Craig construct his ambitious designs in an abandoned monastery with a large multinational team of men and women artists. Michael Carr helped build moving platforms, colored lights and wooden marionettes, while Catharina Carr translated a book about Javanese puppet theater from Dutch that heavily influenced Craig's use of light and shadow.

However, after a year of work, Craig ran out of funding to pay his employees, and the Carrs were forced to leave him after becoming ill due to undernourishment and exhaustion. Upon returning to the United States, Michael Carr gave an interview for the Kansas City Star detailing his experience with Craig, accompanied by sketches of the stage and marionettes. 

For the next two decades, Michael Carmichael Carr worked as a professor, painter and a scenographer. Carr taught at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1909, the University of Missouri until 1917, and the Carnegie Institute of Technology in the early 1920s. Carr regularly displayed his paintings in regional exhibitions and submitted prints to newspapers. He exhibited a series of four woodcut prints titled The Oils of Corsica in the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco.

Alongside his painting and printmaking, he created sets and props for theater productions by directors such as Ben Hecht, Maurice Browne and George Baker. He presented a miniature stage set at the Chicago Little Theater in 1915 demonstrating his modern approach of casting colorful lights across minimal platforms. He further elaborated upon his theory of set design as a way to create 'mental environments' similar to abstract painting in two articles published in the Theatre Arts Magazine in 1918-1919. Carr's designs were included in the prestigious Exhibition of American Stage Designs at the Bourgeois Galleries of New York in 1919, and in an exhibition of stage sets at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1920 alongside other well-known set designers like Robert Edmond Jones.

Michael Carr spent the last years of his life living and working in Missouri and New York and also traveling to Europe with his second wife, Elmira Carr. He died in 1929 at age forty-eight, with little information surrounding the circumstances of his death. His work is held in the collections of the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.