Giorgio Morandi created still lifes in which he abandoned the practical function of objects and focused on the interplay of light, shadows, and forms.
Giorgio Morandi was an Italian painter best known for his still life paintings of bottles and vases. Morandi focused on composition and color rather than bold concepts or striking images. He intentionally stripped his subjects of practical function in order to focus on pure form.
Giorgio Morandi started out as a metaphysical painter
Giorgio Morandi was born in 1890 in Bologna, Italy, where he lived most of his life. He was the eldest of eight children and became head of the family at the age of 19 when his father died unexpectedly. He studied painting at the Bologna Academy of Fine Arts and learned the etching technique on his own by studying the etchings of Rembrandt.
Photo: thecollector.com
Morandi's earliest artistic period that brought him recognition was associated with "Pittura Metafisica", or metaphysical painting, invented by Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carra. Morandi did not stay with this current for long, however, and soon developed his own artistic vision of the concept.
In his later interviews, the artist stated that he had always been an advocate of art for art's sake. He sought eternal values that remained unchanged from era to era, rather than following trends dictated by political and social ideas.
Morandi - unfazed by trends, inspired by the masters
Despite living in perhaps the most prolific decade in the history of art, Morandi was not influenced by rapidly changing artistic movements. Symbolism and Art Deco gave way to Cubism and Expressionism, and the Surrealists and all forms of abstraction took their place in the marketplace, but Giorgio Morandi remained true to his own style and form.
He was well aware of the many artistic events that were unfolding in Europe, but chose to respectfully ignore them and focus on his own creative world.
Nevertheless, Giorgio Morandi's work was markedly influenced by one of the most famous and influential French artists of all time,
Paul Cezanne. Although Morandi had never been to France, he had the opportunity to see the collection of Cezanne's works on display at the Venice Biennale.
He later claimed to be the first Italian artist to recognize and understand Cezanne's innovation in painting. Like Morandi, Cezanne worked extensively with still lifes and landscapes. The essence of his artistic concept was to break down all existing objects into combinations of simple geometric shapes - cylinders, cones and spheres.
Morandi took this idea and applied it to his work. He was also an avid admirer of Caravaggio and on every trip through Italy religiously visited the places where his works were displayed.
The darkest decades of Italian history
Giorgio Morandi was drafted into the army at the beginning of World War I as a young man. Because of his tall stature, Morandi was assigned to the artillery, but was only there for a few months. Morandi soon suffered a nervous breakdown and was discharged from the army. However, a dark chapter in European history was just beginning.
Photo: thecollector.com
For more than two decades of Benito Mussolini's fascist regime, Morandi remained in Italy. He never joined any political party. Although he occasionally published essays in art magazines associated with the Fascists, he had many friends, including artists and art historians, who belonged to the underground anti-fascist resistance.
Morandi's protest against the violence and brutality of the regime was aesthetic. In a society that valued direct, clear and naturalistic messages, he worked with subtle contrast, complex compositions and intellectualism.
Fascist culture claimed to bring back the aesthetic values of the great Italian past with its art inspired by antiquity, but it was Morandi who truly valued his country's historical heritage.
He was associated with the great artists of the Italian Renaissance, their intellectual endeavors and beautiful works.
Never titled his work
Although Morandi worked on fairly small paintings, he worked slowly and meticulously. He lived modestly and did not aim to turn his art into a financially secure career. Despite all this, his work sold quite well. During his lifetime, Morandi painted over 1300 works, most of which were still lifes.
Although Giorgio Morandi worked with obviously material and often utilitarian objects, he always emphasized that his work had no metaphysical or symbolic overtones. He painted exactly what he wanted to paint, paying attention to form and harmony.
All the titles of his works were invented by the collectors who acquired them. Morandi rid his objects of artificial context and presented them as they are, allowing symbolism and interpretations to develop anew.
I've never painted a live flower
A special part of Giorgio Morandi's paintings were still lifes with flowers. Surprisingly, he worked only with dried or artificial flowers and never painted live ones. This was partly a tribute to the tradition of composing bouquets of handmade and hand-dyed silk and velvet flowers that was popular in Bologna in the nineteenth century.
Photo: thecollector.com
Morandi also rarely worked with space in its traditional sense. He was not concerned with painting the structure of furniture or the flat surfaces of tables and walls on which his objects were placed. Instead, he allowed objects, shadows, and their interaction with each other to create a three-dimensional space in the painting.
Morandi's objects were strangely impractical
Despite the apparent familiarity of his compositions, Morandi's still lifes began to seem strange upon close examination. Familiar vases and bowls took on strange bulges or seemed devoid of functional space.
Morandi did not paint objects, but compositions. Instead, mindful of their practical function, he constructed his scenes from elements, like musical works composed of sounds.
He focused on subtle color combinations and the interplay of lines, leaving materiality behind. In a way, this brought him closer to his colleagues' experiments with abstract art.
Covering objects with plaster
Morandi used common everyday objects such as vases and bottles in his works. These objects, although made of glass or porcelain, never displayed their distinctive material qualities in the artist's works.
Morandi's work lacked the transparency of glass or the texture of ceramics. Before he began working on a still life, he covered each object with a thick layer of plaster and painted it in colors that matched his intention. He deliberately applied the plaster unevenly and roughly in order to subvert the viewer's expectations and make the object completely non-functional.
Landscapes
Although Morandi was known as a still-life painter, he produced quite a few landscapes as well. However, his choice of subjects was surprisingly limited. While living in Bologna, he painted only the courtyard of his family home from different angles and at different times of the year.
Like his still lifes, Morandi's landscapes lack the practical or social context usually present in such works. Even the landscapes he painted during the war years lacked signs of their era, such as anxiety or restlessness.
To paint a landscape, Morandi first cut out a small cardboard frame and used it to observe the scene in front of him, setting the boundaries of his art. To avoid changing position while drawing from life, he circled his feet with chalk.
One of the most underrated contemporary artists
Giorgio Morandi is a surprisingly dull artist to study if one is looking for a colorful personality with a fascinating biography. He didn't start a family of his own and lived with his mother and three sisters. He didn't even have a separate studio and worked in his bedroom in the family home, which had no separate entrance.
Photo: thecollector.com
To see Morandi's easel, one had to first pass through his sisters' room. He had never been to Paris, which at the time was considered the capital of avant-garde art, and only twice traveled abroad to visit his exhibitions in Switzerland.
For a time he was known as an "artist for artists" who was difficult to categorize and define. The subtlety of his work did not produce a shocking or startling instantaneous effect on the casual viewer.
The essence of Morandi's life and work is a deeply rooted mental and emotional activity that does not require bold gestures of travel. Morandi's paintings demand attention and intellectual effort.