Giorgio Morandi was an Italian painter and printmaker of the 20th century. The main subjects of his calm and meditative still lifes made in the subdued and warm color palette were vases with flowers, boxes, jars and bottles. These oil and watercolor depictions of everyday household things, as well as the artist’s landscapes, represent a rejection of the turbulent modern life.
Background
Giorgio Morandi was born on July 20, 1890, in Bologna, Emilia-Romagna, Italy. He was the first-born in a middle-class family of Andrea Morandi, a businessman, and Maria Maccaferri. Morandi had three sisters, Anna, Dina and Maria Teresa, and one brother Giuseppe who died young in 1903.
Giorgio showed his interest in art at an early age. It disappointed his father who would like his son to pursue his export business. Morandi’s mother, in contrast, supported the dreams of her son.
The head of a family, Andrea Morandi, died in 1909. From then on, Giorgio became the main breadwinner.
Education
Giorgio Morandi entered the Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna (Bologna Academy of Fine Arts) in 1907.
Morandi was a brilliant student. On his third year, he traveled to Florence where he developed an interest in 19th-century artists and such Renaissance painters as Paul Cezanne and Piero della Francesca. In addition to studies, Morandi mastered himself etching activity through the books on Rembrandt.
Morandi received his degree in fine arts in 1913.
Career
Giorgio Morandi started his professional journey from a brief work at his father’s export office. Then, more fascinated by art than by sales, he pursued his further career as an artist.
Shortly associated with Futurists, including Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, and Giacomo Balla, Morandi participated at their group exhibition organized in Bologna in 1914. It was the first occasion for him to present his artworks to the public. The same time, the young artist started to teach drawing at Bolognese elementary schools. In a year, at the outbreak of the World War I, he joined the Italian army but his military service was brief because of a grave breakdown. Discharged from the army, Morandi developed an interest in still-life and landscapes which remained his main genres during the subsequent years.
Searching for his own way in art, in 1918, Giorgio Morandi associated with the Metaphysical school of painting founded by Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrá a year before. The metaphysical period of Morandi’s art lasted four years. During this time, the artist participated in the exhibitions of the group and adopted de Chirico’s mysterious lyrical elements. A journal on arts related to the movement, La Racolta, featured Morandi’s 1915 etching. It was his debut in periodicals. The collaboration with the school provided the painter with recognition on the international level that encouraged him to pursue his artistic way.
The debut solo exhibition of Giorgio Morandi was organized in 1919 in Rome with the support of the editor of Valori Plastici magazine, Mario Broglio. In addition, he purchased almost all Morandi’s canvases presented at the show.
During the 1920s, the painter produced some still-lifes poetic in style with rural elements to compete with the 18th-century artist Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin. In 1926, Morandi obtained a post of the inspector at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. The same year, he participated for the first time at Novecento Italiano show where he returned again in 1929. The same year, the painter tried himself as an illustrator creating pictures for the work ‘Il sole a picco’ by Vincenzo Cardarelli.
By the time, the artist completely dropped rural values and concentrated on the style of modern for which he became popular later. The first exhibition with Novecento Italiano was followed in a couple of years by the Venice Biennale at which he demonstrated his artworks regularly since then as he did at the Quadriennale in Rome and at other art places around Italy.
In addition to painting, Giorgio Morandi often used etchings in his practice. He was appointed as a professor of etching at his alma-mater Accademia di Belle Arti in Bologna (Bologna Academy of Fine Arts) in 1930. He had held the post for twenty-six years.
In 1948, he took part at the Venice Biennale and in 1957 at São Paulo Biennial.
Till the end of his days, Giorgio Morandi worked most of the time far from a busy art community in his studio at Via Fondazza in Bologna. This fact didn’t disturb him to being recognized as an influential modern painter.
Politics
Giorgio Morandi supported the early Fascist party in the 1920s. Due to the collaboration with Mussolini's government, the artist received job offers and was provided by exhibitions and sales this time.
At the beginning of the World War II, Morandi broke all the connections with the regime and became politically neutral. In 1943, he was briefly imprisoned under suspicion of taking part in resistance movements.
Views
Quotations:
"After all, even a still life is architecture."
"Even in as simple a subject, a great painter can achieve a majesty of vision and an intensity of feeling to which we immediately respond."
"There is little or nothing new in the world. What matters is the new and different position in which an artist finds himself seeing and considering the things of so-called nature and the works that preceded and interested him."
"I believe nothing is more abstract than reality."
"I am essentially a painter of the kind of still-life composition that communicates a sense of tranquility and privacy, moods which I have always valued above all else."
"[I am a] believer in Art for Art's sake rather than in Art for the sake of religion, of social justice or national glory. Nothing is more alien to me than an art which sets out to serve other purposes than those implied in the work of Art in itself."
"Though aware of just how hard it will be to attain the distant goal I have glimpsed, I am sustained by the certainty that the path I am following is the right one. I repudiate nothing in my past.. Conscience has always guided me in my work and I am comforted by the knowledge that in all my endeavors, even in the moments of greatest uncertainty, my personality has always managed to come through."
Personality
Giorgio Morandi was quiet and polite person who preferred stability and calm to the life rich on events. That’s why he didn’t take an active part at many exhibitions and other art events often rejecting the invitations to demonstrate his paintings. He was considered by his surroundings as an enigmatic but optimistic man.
Morandi was an avid smoker.
Quotes from others about the person
"All this calm, all this peace, this somber equilibrium that underlies the works of Giorgio Morandi and found in Max Ernst and Giorgio de Chirico masks the uneasiness that something threatening is about to explode." Salvador Dali, painter
"Viewed in a series, Morandi's paintings affirm an order that is as new, variable, and convincing as Piet Mondrian's his closest modern equivalent in spirit although not in style. In figurative terms, rather than in the abstract terms of Mondrian, Morandi devoted himself to studying the slight but crucial shifting of weight in forms that counterbalance each other." J.T.Soby, art historian