Giorgio Morandi
gigatos | February 7, 2022
Summary
Giorgio Morandi (July 20, 1890, Bologna – June 18, 1964, Bologna) was an Italian painter and graphic artist.
The future artist, the oldest of five children, was born into the family of Andrea Morandi (1858-1909), co-owner of the Bologna branch of a French hemp trading firm, who in 1889 married the 19-year-old Maria Maccaferri. At first Giorgio worked in his father”s firm, but an early passion for painting set him on a different path in life: in 1907 he enrolled in the Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna (Academy of Fine Arts of Bologna). After the early death of his father, thanks to his mother”s efforts to educate her children, Giorgio was able to continue his studies and graduate from the Accademia in 1913. Morandi achieved good results in the study, but did not receive from an academic education the school of creativity, which sought. This school could have given him a trip to Paris, which he dreamed of in the early 1910s, but the financial difficulties of his family did not allow him to leave Bologna, where in 1914-1929 he taught drawing in elementary schools.
In the new French painting, with which Morandi initially had the opportunity to get acquainted only with black and white reproductions, he was guided by the works of Renoir and, in particular, Cézanne. But if the young artist was able to see paintings by Renoir directly in 1910 (at the IX Venice Biennale, where paintings by Renoir were given an entire hall), the art of Cézanne, he for a long time studied only by reproductions.
The earliest of Morandi”s presently known works, a landscape and a portrait of his sister Dina, executed in a sharp plastic manner, are dated 1911 and 1912. In 1913-1914, Giorgio Morandi participated in several futurist exhibitions in Bologna and Rome, getting to know Umberto Boccioni and Carlo Carr and being praised by Italian futurist leader Tomaso Marinetti, but his creative pursuits largely developed under the influence of the works of French Cubists and partly of Henri Rousseau. In parallel with his interest in the experiments of the newest movements, Morandi deepened his study of the paintings of the old masters – Giotto, Masaccio, Uccello, Piero della Francesca – with trips to Florence (1910), Padua and Assisi.
In connection with the entry of Italy into the hostilities of the First World War in the summer of 1915, Morandi was drafted into the army in the same year (because of his very tall stature he was assigned to a grenade launcher regiment), but after two months of service he suffered a nervous breakdown and was discharged. In 1917 Morandi became seriously ill again and was almost unable to work.
In 1916-1919 Morandi”s creative quest brought him closer to the representatives of the so-called “metaphysical painting” – Giorgio de Chirico, Arturo Martini and, in particular, Carlo Carr. In the first post-war years, these artists, together with Morandi, were part of the “Valori Plastici” (“Plastic Values”), named after the magazine of the same name founded in 1918 by artist, publisher and art dealer Mario Broglio, who in 1921 organized a traveling exhibition of the group in Berlin, Dresden, Hanover and Munich. Broglio was the first to sign an exclusive contract with the Bolognese artist and began selling his work. By 1922, however, when Morandi was still exhibiting with de Chirico, Carra and Martini at the “Spring Exhibition” in Florence (and de Chirico wrote an article about him in the catalog of that exhibition), his new works indicated that his “metaphysical stage” was a thing of the past.
In the 1930s Giorgio Morandi receives his first recognition. At first as a graphic artist: the successes of the preceding decade in the field of etching allowed him in 1930 to head the chair of etching technique at the Bologna Academy of Fine Arts (he held the chair until 1956). In 1932 Morandi participated in the First Exhibition of Modern Italian Engravings in Florence, and at the same time L”italiano magazine dedicated a special issue to him with an article by Ardengo Soffici, at whose request Morandi became a corresponding member of the Florentine Academy of Fine Arts in 1938. Gradually his painting also becomes a noticeable phenomenon in Italian art: since 1931 Morandi”s works are presented at the most prestigious national exhibition, the Roman Quadrenale, and in 1939 the artist was honored to show 42 of his paintings in a separate Hall III of the Roman Quadrenale.
In the mid-1930s, his paintings were praised by the famous art historian Roberto Longhi and the important collector, critic and entrepreneur Lamberto Vitali (1896-1992), with whom Giorgio Morandi was subsequently linked by a long friendship. During the Second World War, thanks to the help of Longhi, the artist was rescued from Bologna prison and later supported by the organization of his personal exhibition in the Florentine gallery “Il Fiore”, which opened on April 25, 1945, the day of the liberation of Bologna by the Allies. Vitali became not only one of the greatest collectors of Morandi”s works (the most valuable of which he left to the Pinacoteca Brera in Milan), but also the author of a lifetime catalog of his drawings (1957) and a posthumous composite catalog of his works (1977).
Despite the fame that came to Morandi in the postwar years, he did not change his modest lifestyle. Unmarried, he lived with his unmarried sisters in his parents” old-fashioned apartment in Bologna, one of whose rooms served as his studio and bedroom. It was not until 1959 that he built a house in the rural commune of Grizzana, 30 kilometers from Bologna, where he had visited for many years during the war; here Morandi spent the summer months with his sisters in the last years of his life. In 1985, the artist”s name was added to the name of this commune: Grizzana-Morandi.
In the late 1950s, in a rare interview, Giordo Morandi spoke about the main genre of his work in this way:
“In essence, I am an artist whose lion”s share of work is still life, capable of conveying to the viewer a sense of peace and intimacy, qualities which I myself value more than anything else. <…>
Vitali”s consolidated catalogs reveal some 1,340 oil paintings by Giorgio Morandi (not including watercolors and drawings). Landscapes make up a little less than one fifth of his heritage, Morandi left almost no portraits (the rest of his works are still lifes, to which we can refer a large group of his “Flowers” (he called them “floral still lifes” – and usually gave them to connoisseurs of his talent, friends, his sisters), as well as a number of paintings and etchings depicting shells – “images of the petrified world”.
Art historians who visited the studio of Giorgio Morandi noted the artist”s special approach to nature, from which his still lifes were born. According to Roberto Longhi they were “useless objects,” that is, objects ripped from reality. Victoria Markova recalled: “…Almost all of these objects–the variously shaped bottles, jars, vases–were either painted with gouache in specific colors <…> or covered with a deliberately careless layer of plaster, so that they lost not only their utilitarian connection to everyday life, but also their natural texture and material properties–glass was no longer glass, and metal was no longer metal. James Troll Sobie, curator of the New York exhibition Italian Art of the 20th Century (1949), noted that when preparing objects for his still lifes (boxes, parallelepipeds) Morandi often “…painted over their surfaces with simple geometric shapes – squares, circles, rectangles – in invariably soft colors.” Maria Christiane Bandera, scientific director of the Robert Longy Foundation, described an object “made of tin specially at Morandi”s request and often found in his works – in the form of an overturned funnel put on a cylinder. Having comprehensively studied the artist”s work technology, she emphasized that Morandi had distanced himself from the functionality of his staged objects and had long assembled and adapted them to one another.
It is significant that when comparing the subject compositions in different Morandi still lifes of the same period, for example, the late 1940s, Bandera writes about them in terms of music and architecture:
“He would then join them together as a whole, then turn them around, orchestrating their melody with colors full of light, refined, exquisite. He selected objects with elongated shapes – jugs, vases, lamps, bottles. Most often bottles, his own bottles: dark, traditional Burgundy bottles; long-necked bottles that resemble the spires of Gothic cathedrals, stretching upward, with spots of light that accentuate their slenderness; spiral and fluted bottles; pyramid-shaped bottles with a triangular base; “Persian” bottles, flat, with a short neck. He selected vessels as elementary forms of different heights and proportions to help build a composition…”
Giorgio Morandi is a completely independent phenomenon in twentieth-century art. The “metaphysical” influence he experienced in the early phase of his work would not have been of any interest (this stereotypical arrangement of “mannequin-like” figures in the spirit of G. Chirico in a geometrically simplified three-dimensionality), and would have said nothing about the artist with whom his name is associated if even his earliest works had not displayed the refined colorist that he appears to be at the most expressive period of his painting, so we cannot speak of closeness to minimalism, which some art critics point out, as his gamut, while seemingly simple, is extremely complex, and built on the finest nuances; And the forms present in his works are simple, but varied enough, endowed with character, and at times intricately fanciful, rather than primitive in the sense implied by this style.
The key to understanding his art lies in the paintings of the early Italian Renaissance, in the frescoes of Giotto, in the still lifes of F. The key to understanding his art lies in the frescoes of Giotto and the still lifes of F. Surbaran or the simple sketches of J.-B. S. Chardin. The very way of life of the artist, who distanced himself from the problems of the mundane world (he practically never left Bologna), speaks of the desire to see and show the beauty of simple forms – the ability to constantly find it in this quiet, chamber life, which appears behind the imaginary monotony in a variety, “intimacy” of the moods of his paintings.
G. Morandi”s experiments in easel graphics are also interesting. His etchings are characterized by a soft tonal range close to that inherent in his paintings, and here he solves the same problems as in oil painting, but achieves it using technically completely different means, the result being the unity of the figurative system. The subjects of G. Morandi”s still lifes are closed even here on prosaic household items – coffee pots, jars, bottles… The artist has found his own approach to solving the most interesting compositional, artistic and plastic problems. With the help of crossing strokes – crossing each other or passing from one object to another, without contours, he achieves the transfer of spatial relationships, light and shadow. Subjects pass smoothly into the background, there is no outline, no clear boundaries. The artist achieves high harmony and great integrity of the print.
His works were awarded the painting prize at the Venice Biennale (1948), the grand prize for the series of etchings at the São Paulo Biennale (1953) and the grand prize for painting at the São Paulo Biennale (1957). In 1962, after a solo exhibition in Siegen, the artist received the Rubens Prize, and in 1963 the Golden Arquiginasio medal on behalf of the city of Bologna.
Morandi”s still lifes appear in Federico Fellini”s “La Dolce Vita” (1960) and Michelangelo Antonioni”s “Night” (1961).
The first monographic exhibition of Giorgio Morandi in the Soviet Union was organized from May 18 to July 10, 1973 in Moscow, in the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. It included 24 paintings (including two from the State Hermitage collection), 13 watercolors and drawings, and 50 etchings.
In 1989, Leningrad and Moscow hosted a large retrospective exhibition dedicated to the 100th anniversary of Morandi and organized as part of a large-scale international tour “Progetto Morandi Europa. Sette mostre in sette musei” (“seven exhibitions in seven museums”). The project began in November 1988 in Finnish Tampere, then the exhibition was shown in Leningrad: from January 21 to February 19, 1989 58 paintings, 25 watercolors, 25 pencil drawings and 22 etchings were exhibited in the halls of the Nadvornaya Gallery of the Winter Palace. In Moscow the host of the exhibition was the Union of Artists of the USSR, but due to a miscommunication in the organization, the exhibition, which was held in March in the halls of the Central House of Artists, was shortened by half. The exhibition then traveled to London, Locarno, and Tübingen; according to the organizer of this tour, Marilena Pasquali, it ended in March 1990 in Düsseldorf.
Morandi”s third national exhibition was held in Moscow, in the halls of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, from April 25 to September 10, 2017. The exhibition included 46 paintings, 7 watercolors, 23 etchings and 8 etching boards. A detailed catalog, published in Russian and Italian in parallel translation, was an essential addition to the works on display.
Sources
