Giorgio Morandi (20 July 1890 – 18 June 1964) was an Italian painter and printmaker widely known for his subtly muted still-life paintings of ceramic vessels, flowers, and landscapes.
Morandi was born in Bologna, Italy, to Andrea Morandi and Maria Maccaferri, the eldest of five children. He lived first on Via Lame, where his brother Giuseppe and his sister Anna were born. The family then moved to Via Avesella, where two other sisters were born, Dina in 1900 and Maria Teresa in 1906. After the death of his father in 1909, the family moved to Via Fondazza, and Giorgio became the head of the family.
From 1907 to 1913, he studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna ('Academy of Fine Arts of Bologna'). At the Accademia, which based its traditions on 14th-century painting, Morandi taught himself to etch by studying books on Rembrandt. He was excellent at his studies, although his professors disapproved of the changes in his style during his final two years at the Accademia.
In 1910, he visited Florence, where the works of artists such as Giotto, Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, and Paolo Uccello made a profound impression on him. He had a brief digression into a Futurist style in 1914. In that same year, Morandi was appointed instructor of drawing for elementary schools in Bologna, a post he held until 1929. Morandi was influenced by the works of Cézanne, Derain, and Picasso.
Morandi began exhibiting in 1914 in Bologna, alongside Mario Bacchelli, Osvaldo Licini, Severo Pozzati and Giacomo Vespignani, and at the First Free Futurist Exhibition at the Sprovieri Gallery in Rome.
In 1915, he joined the army, had a breakdown and was discharged. During World War I, Morandi's still life paintings became more reduced in their compositional elements and more pure in form, reflecting an admiration for both Cézanne and Henri Rousseau.
Morandi practiced metaphysical painting (Italian: pittura metafisica) from 1918 to 1922. This was his last major stylistic shift; thereafter, he focused increasingly on subtle gradations of hue, tone, and objects arranged in a unifying atmospheric haze, establishing the direction his art was to take for the rest of his life. In the first post-war period he collaborated with Mario Broglio's magazine Valori Plastici, met Giorgio de Chirico, and exhibited with de Chirico, Carlo Carrà and Arturo Martini at the Fiorentina Primaverile in 1922. Morandi showed in the Novecento Italiano exhibitions of 1926 and 1929, but was more specifically associated with the regional Strapaese group by the end of the decade, a fascist-influenced group emphasizing local cultural traditions. He was sympathetic to the Fascist party in the 1920s, although his friendships with anti-Fascist figures led authorities to arrest him briefly in 1943.
From 1928, Morandi exhibited his work in Italy and abroad. He participated in some of the Venice Biennale exhibitions, where, in 1948, he won first prize for painting, and in the Rome Quadriennale, in 1931 and 1935. In 1929, he illustrated the work Il sole a picco by Vincenzo Cardarelli, winner of the Premio Bagutta. From 1930 to 1956, Morandi was a professor of etching at Accademia di Belle Arti. He visited Paris for the first time in 1956. That year he also travelled to Winterthur to attend the opening of a solo exhibition and to study works by Chardin and Cézanne in the Oskar Reinhart Collection. Morandi received the Grand Prize for engraving at the São Paulo Art Biennial in 1953, the Grand Prize for painting at the same event in 1957, and the Rubens Prize of the city of Siegen in 1962.
Morandi died of lung cancer on 18 June 1964 at age 73. He is buried in the Certosa di Bologna in the family tomb, together with his three sisters. On the tomb is a portrait of him by Giacomo Manzù.
Bologna and the Apennine landscape
Morandi's work remained closely connected with Bologna and with the Bolognese Apennines. He spent almost his entire life in Bologna, where his studio and apartment in Via Fondazza became associated with the domestic objects, books and working materials that recur in his still lifes. In his landscapes, he repeatedly returned to familiar places in and around the city. The Vatican Museums note that he favoured the outskirts of Bologna, depicting familiar places without human presence. Works associated with Bologna include The Bridge over the Savena at Bologna and Landscape (The Chimneys of the Arsenal on the Outskirts of Bologna), while the Museum of Modern Art holds prints such as Bridge over the Savena, Bologna and View of Montagnola, Bologna.
Grizzana became another central place in Morandi's life and work. He first encountered its landscape in 1913, when the Morandi family spent the summer there after a doctor recommended a stay in healthier air for his sister Anna. The family later returned regularly to Grizzana, and during World War II Morandi and his sisters stayed there to escape the disruption of city life in Bologna. At the end of the 1950s the family built a summer house at Grizzana; the building later became the Casa Museo Morandi, preserving the artist's studio and domestic environment.
The Fienili del Campiaro, visible from the Grizzana house, are among the places most closely associated with Morandi's Apennine landscapes. The Centro di Documentazione Giorgio Morandi, founded in 1984, has been housed since 2000 in the Campiaro complex, which includes the Museo degli Allievi, an exhibition space and the artist's family house, now a museum. Another significant Apennine site was Rocca di Roffeno, a hamlet of Castel d'Aiano, where Morandi spent five summers between 1934 and 1938. According to the Museo Morandi, 39 works related to those summers are known, including 32 paintings, one watercolour, four drawings and two etchings.
Museum interpretations generally treat Morandi's landscapes not as simple topographical views, but as formally distilled compositions. The Uffizi describe Paesaggio a Grizzana as a work based on observed reality but transformed through a careful synthesis of light, volume and structure, with references to Cézanne and Piero della Francesca.
Morandi's mature work is characterized by a deliberately restricted range of subjects, formats and tones. His paintings are usually small in scale and centred on still lifes and landscapes, but their apparent simplicity has often been described by museums and critics as masking a complex organization of forms, intervals and tonal relationships. The Phillips Collection describes still life as Morandi's ideal subject, since his primary concern was a measured balance of composition and tone.
His still lifes were made from ordinary studio objects, including bottles, bowls, boxes, cups, vases, pitchers and jars, which he repeatedly arranged and rearranged on a tabletop. According to the Phillips Collection, Morandi sometimes altered these objects by painting their surfaces, removing labels and reflections in order to emphasize shape and volume. This repeated use of a limited group of objects allowed him to investigate subtle changes in placement, light, scale and spatial tension.
Morandi's palette is generally subdued, with earthy colours, greys, creams, browns and muted tonal transitions. In a discussion of Still Life (1920), the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao notes that even apparently monochrome works may contain a range of tones and that Morandi's dense, opaque paint gives body and volume to his forms. His use of dim, diffuse light and restrained colour contributes to the quiet, contemplative quality for which his work is known.
Although Morandi briefly engaged with Futurism and metaphysical painting, his mature art moved away from the rhetoric of the avant-garde toward a slow, concentrated exploration of perception. The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao has emphasized the importance of earlier art for Morandi, especially the geometry and intimacy of Chardin, the use of light in Zurbarán, the naturalism of Italian seventeenth-century painting, and details in works by El Greco and Giuseppe Crespi.