Giorgio Morandi

Photo by Herbert List/Magnum Photos, courtesy the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

Morandi in his Bologna studio, 1953

From the Files

+ Between 1910 and 1947, Morandi painted 603 canvases. After exhibiting in the 1948 Venice Biennale with Carrà and de Chirico and winning the prize for painting, he increased his output, making 662 paintings in the last 16 years of his life.

+ His inclusion in the 1949 exhibition "20th-Century Italian Art," at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, cemented his international reputation. At the end of the show, the museum acquired, directly from the artist, a 1916 still life that he considered a breakthrough and had kept nailed above the door of his studio for years.

+ Even in the present unpredictable market, Morandis have held their value. The 1956 still life that was featured on the cover of the catalogue for the Sotheby’s Italian sale in London in October 2008 earned a solid £657,250 ($1.1 million), just under the high estimate of £700,000 ($1.2 million).

Agnes Martin Richard Tuttle Wayne Thiebaud Josef Albers Frank Gehry Joseph Cornell Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn Giorgio de Chirico

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"Nothing is more abstract than reality," Giorgio Morandi once said. The meditative, rigorous still lifes he painted with single-minded concentration for 50 years poetically illuminate this perspective. Born in 1890 in Bologna, Italy, an area he rarely left, the artist lived and worked until his death, in 1964, in a modest apartment he shared with his mother and three unmarried sisters. On the floor of his bedroom were hundreds of bottles, bowls, lamps, pitchers and jars that he arranged and painted in endless tonal and spatial variations, likes pawns isolated on an existential chessboard. A reticent and cerebral man, Morandi believed it was important to create "good painting without drawing attention to one’s private life."

If Morandi personally shunned the spotlight, his paintings were exhibited widely in Italy and abroad, promoted early on by artists such as Giorgio de Chirico, and sought after later by Italian celebrities, including Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni. The outlines of his life and his monklike devotion to his art (akin to that of Joseph Cornell, who focused intently on the boxes he assembled in relative seclusion) have drawn a cultish following, particularly among other artists. Morandi’s work has influenced the painters Ben Nicholson and Wayne Thiebaud and even the architect Frank Gehry, whose Winton Guest House, in Minnesota, completed in 1987, makes direct reference to the arrangement of five geometrical solids in a 1956 still life by the artist.

"Morandi is like an icon for artists," says Renato Miracco, the director of the Italian Cultural Institute of New York and the co-organizer of the comprehensive Morandi survey that opened last fall at the Metropolitan Museum. During the New York run of the show, Miracco says he overheard a striking number of artists talking reverently about the work on display. "He comes from reality to reach the feeling of abstraction," Miracco explains. (The exhibition is on view through April 12 at the Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, and a separate presentation of 45 paintings, "Morandi: Master of Modern Still Life," is at the Phillips Collection, in Washington D.C., through May 24.)

Morandi has long been a painter’s painter. Now connoisseurs are showing devotion as well. Emmanuel Di-Donna, the senior vice president of Impressionist and modern art at Sotheby’s, notes that Morandi’s top six auction prices have all been achieved in the past two years; his record, £1.3 million ($2.7 million), was paid for the 1920 Natura morta, at Christie’s London in 2007. "There have always been dedicated Italian buyers and a steady group of European collectors, but now we’re seeing more American bidding, which has been a nice surprise," says Di-Donna. "When we started doing Italian sales in London, in 2000, that put Morandi in a more international context and helped improve the market tremendously."

Despite his reclusive existence, Morandi did not work in a vacuum. He entered Bologna’s Accademia di Belle Arti, a school grounded in the traditions of 14th-century painting, in 1907 and taught himself to etch by studying books on Rembrandt. But by 1910 he had also discovered modernism, through journals and exhibition catalogues. He experimented with fusing the realism of such Italian masters as Giotto and Piero della Francesca with lessons learned from Cézanne as well as the Futurist movement then gripping Italy. One of his few figurative canvases from this early period, Le bagnanti, 1915, which shows the clear influence of Cézanne, sold at Christie’s Milan in 2005 for €1.1 million ($1.4 million) to the Fondazione Domus, a public collection run by the Bank of Verona. Although not classic Morandi, the painting is significant art historically, says Mariolina Bassetti, the head of the modern and contemporary art department at Christie’s in Italy, who also runs the Italian sale in London. "If all your Morandis are iconographical, you may also want an early work," she adds. "But if you do not have a Morandi at all, you are trying to find a still life."