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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Morandi’s deliberately unfinished watercolors from the early 1960s are of interest to connoisseurs of contemporary drawings, according to Leiber, noting that a collector of Richard Tuttle’s works recently purchased one. The top price at auction for one of the artist’s still-life watercolors is £57,600 ($108,679), paid at Sotheby’s in 2006 for an example from 1960.

Morandi was also a superb etcher, a technique he taught beginning in 1930 at the Accademia di Belle Arti. He created great tonal nuance in the webs of crosshatching that surround his objects like warm light. Bassetti notes that, unlike with most artists, a Morandi etching can achieve a higher price than a watercolor or drawing. Last fall in New York, Pace Master Prints held a show of 27 Morandi etchings, 7 of which were for sale, priced from $35,000 to $95,000, while the Lucas Schoormans Gallery, in an exhibition highlighting the drawings and etchings, offered his Grande natura morta con la lampada a destra, 1928, for around $123,000. A larger etching of the same name and year had set Morandi’s auction record for prints, $115,500, in 1990 at Sotheby’s New York.

The collector Cartin evaluated at least 50 of the artist’s works before adding one, in 2005, to his eclectic holdings that include works by Agnes Martin and Hans Memling. He points out that an art lover could buy several great Morandis for the price of a Richard Prince Nurse painting: "Unlike contemporary art, the few people who buy Morandi paintings and the few dealers that sell them seem to have arrived at an understandable equation of quality and price." But it’s not reasonable valuations that attracted Cartin. "Morandi," he says, "asked some of the most interesting questions about painting through his endless rearrangement of the simplest objects, in the most ordinary of settings, with the most limited of palettes. It occurs to me that he was looking for nothing less than the perfect Morandi."

"Giorgio Morandi" originally appeared in the April 2009 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's April 2009 Table of Contents.