Giorgio Morandi

Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) is one of those great, solitary, timeless geniuses that have occasionally emerged in the course of the history of art. He always lived in isolation—almost like a hermit—in his native Bologna, where he developed an entirely personal artistic language that ignored fashions. As a result, for a long time his work was relegated to an undeserved oblivion—a situation that fortunately is now gradually being resolved at the end of this twentieth century in which he chanced to live and in which, when its history is written, he will appear as one of the most outstanding figures. This exhibition, joining other recent initiatives to set his work in the special place that it deserves, offers an extensive selection from his entire output. It starts with one of his first landscapes, of 1911, and concludes with his last works, dated 1964 and made shortly before his death. In half a century of painting Morandi consolidated one of the purest and most personal styles in contemporary international art, a style in which painting and poetry coexist in perfect harmony. Despite his deliberate retirement, he was always attentive to modernity. As we can see in the first rooms in the exhibition, he participated fleetingly in some of the avant-garde movements that emerged around him—such as Cubism, Futurism and Metaphysical painting—before shaping his own definitive pictorial language. It was in the early twenties that his work attained its magical conjunction of light and colour, the personal ability to effect subtle variations in the tonalities of different areas and to achieve a brightness comparable only to that of the great masters of the Italian quattrocento. Morandi invariably cultivated a figurative style of painting, which gradually became more symbolic. Apart from a few landscapes, always without figures, his work focused almost exclusively on still-life. In these unmistakable pictures, full of serenity, he represents simple daily objects with a pictorial language of great purity, in a range of muted colours ranging from ochre, pink and cream to pale or greyish blues, and all in a unique, unrepeatable light. Morandi’s drawings and, above all, his watercolours possess the same special elegance in their painting and they, too, deserve a leisurely contemplation. Surprising features of the watercolours are the economy of brushstrokes, his way of diluting colours and his mastery in converting emptiness into form, coming close to oriental aesthetics. The exhibition is supplemented by the presentation of a selection of his engravings. Morandi was a virtuoso of this technique, too, and one of the great master engravers of the century. For him engraving was a form of plastic investigation without colour. Etching was his favourite technique, and he invented a procedure of parallel hatching that he employed to create tonal effects and which gives all his graphic work a very characteristic appearance. His engravings are truly exercises in transcribing the plastic experiments with the expression of light in his oil-paintings, so that he sometimes transferred to this technique a subject previously painted in oils. Curiously, the same reasoning also applies in reverse: the achievement of a gradation of tonal effects in his engravings by means of the gradation in hatching was fundamental for the attainment of the tonal variation of the colours in his oil-paintings, an aspect in which Morandi once again reveals his genius.