Bologna, 1890 – 1964
One of the greatest Italian artists of the early 20th century, Morandi was able to transform the influence of Cézanne, André Derain, Cubism and the great masters of the Italian Renaissance to develop his own distinctive pictorial style.
Giorgio Morandi was born in Bologna on 20 July 1890. In 1907, he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, where he befriended Osvaldo Licini. Drawn both to French avant-garde painting and to the great Italian art of the past, in 1913 and 1914 he shifted his focus to Futurist aesthetics and took part in several exhibitions organised by the group. In 1915, he was appointed as an art teacher in a primary school, a post he held until 1929. In the same year, he was called up for military service, but having fallen seriously ill, he was discharged on medical grounds.
During the First World War, he became interested in Metaphysical Art thanks to his friendship with Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà, through whom he came into contact with Mario Broglio and the magazine ‘Valori Plastici’, which advocated the revival of national values and a return to figurative painting based on the classical model. After 1920, Morandi abandoned metaphysical art and returned to painting landscapes and still lifes with a brushstroke characterised by soft, muted colours and contrasts of varying depths of shadow on the objects.
Closely attuned to the intellectual discourse of the time, Morandi featured in major art exhibitions in Italy and abroad. He was invited to the Venice Biennale in 1928, 1930 and 1948 – the first post-war edition of the Biennale – where he won first prize for painting.
Landscapes and still lifes are the artist’s stylistic hallmark: by isolating his subjects from all ornamentation, each painting captures the slightest variation in colour or space through an original pictorial language. In addition to painting, Morandi also devoted himself to engraving, teaching the subject at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna from 1930 until his retirement in 1956.
After about a year of illness, Giorgio Morandi passed away in Bologna on 18 June 1964.