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."

The most important of Morandi’s still lifes, Bassetti states unequivocally, are those created from 1918 to 1920, of which 18 are known. During this period, the painter was associated with Pittura Metafisica, a short-lived movement, pioneered by Carlo Carrà and de Chirico, that was concerned with revealing the poetic power of the commonplace. Morandi, who met de Chirico in Rome in 1919, was strongly influenced by the severe lighting and sense of charged space in both artists’ works, which he first saw in reproduction.

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.

Although the vast majority of Morandi’s canvases are still lifes of objects, he also painted a number of landscapes, some floral compositions and a handful of portraits. These pictures share the contemplative and structured qualities of the still lifes, but collectors have found them less compelling. "Flowers and landscapes are unfortunately undervalued," says Prini, of the Galleria Tega, which has two important floral works — the last one the artist painted before his death, priced at €260,000 ($338,000), and one from 1942, for €350,000 ($455,000) — as well as a landscape from 1960, for €450,000 ($585,000).

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.