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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The last time one of Morandi’s metaphysical paintings came up at auction was 1997, when his Natura morta con pane e fruttiera, 1919, sold at Sotheby’s London for £793,500 ($1.3 million). "They’re almost all in public collections, and it’s very rare that they come to market. I’m sure that one would raise a new record," says Bassetti, who adds, however, that today such a work could never leave Italy, because of the culture laws. "If an Italian painting is more than 50 years old, it needs a license to be exported," she explains. "And if it is considered important to the national artistic patrimony, it will never get a license," which may be obtained only if no museum in Italy is interested or objects to it leaving the country. Such considerations limited the bidding on Morandi’s top three lots — the record holder plus two still lifes, from 1941 and 1946, which sold in 2007 at Christie’s London for, respectively, £1.2 million ($2.4 million) and £1 million ($2 million) — to Italian connoisseurs. "If [the works] could have been exported or were outside of Italy, they’d have sold for much more," Bassetti asserts.

Camilla Prini, of the Galleria Tega, in Milan — which is offering a large Morandi still life from 1947 for €1.2 million ($1.6 million) — confirms the scarcity of metaphysical canvases and estimates that if any were to come up for sale, they would start at €3 million ($3.9 million) each. These days, she says, collectors, especially those outside Italy, have focused on the artist’s later works, in part because of the export problem.

The most popular Morandis, in Bassetti’s experience, are those from the 1930s, including his crowded compositions of bottles often in bright hues of blue, and, especially, the pictures from the 1940s, when his bottles take on a very architectural appearance. "There is this feeling of sadness and drama in those paintings he made during the war," she explains. Bassetti also praises some of the artist’s work from the 1920s, when he really began to follow his own path, such as the dark, earth-toned 1929 still life that sold at Christie’s Milan in 2007 for €1 million ($1.5 million). She notes, however, that this period’s output is uneven.

It is the postwar pictures that tend to attract contemporary collectors, according to David Leiber, the director of the Sperone Westwater Gallery, in New York. "The canvases are stranger and more abstract — he’s really painting the space around the objects," Leiber says. "I’ve found there are a surprising number of American collectors of contemporary art who have been looking for a Morandi, they want a picture from the late 1940s or 1950s." The gallerist states that these works could be priced from $800,000 to double that. Sperone hosted one of the flurry of gallery shows in New York that coincided with last fall’s Metropolitan exhibition. "Sculpting Time" was conceived and co-organized with Leiber by the New York collector Mickey Cartin. They put five Morandi still lifes — including a 1958 painting offered at $1.4 million and three on loan from Cartin — in the company of works by Josef Albers and On Kawara, among others, underscoring the stripped-down simplification of the Italian artist’s serial variations on a theme. An excellent example, from 1956, of the spare geometry that characterizes these later works sold in 2008 at Sotheby’s New York for $1.6 million.

While Sperone emphasizes the modernity of Morandi’s paintings, putting them in contemporary white frames, the London- and Milan-based gallery Robilant + Voena, which specializes in European paintings from the 15th- to 19th-centuries, shows his works in the Old Masters section at TEFAF Maastricht. "He’s one of the few artists you find in both Old Masters and the modern and contemporary section," says Leiber.