Mor a ndiM a s t e r o f M o d e r n s t i l l l i f e

Mor a n diM a s t e r o f M o d e r n s t i l l l i f e

F l av i o F e r g o n z i a n d e l i s a b e t ta b a r i s o n it h e P h i l l i P s C o l l e C t i o nW a s h i n g t o n , d . C .

c o n t e n t s

7 F o r W a r d g a b r i e l l a b e l l i

9 P r e F a C e d o r o t h y K o s i n s K i

11 g i o r g i o M o r a n d i : C r i t i C i s M , C i t i e s , s o u r C e s , s e r i e s

F a b i o F e r g o n z i

4 1 M o r a n d i i n t h e u n i t e d s t a t e s : e x h i b i t i o n s , g a l l e r i e s , M e M o r i e s

e l i s a b e t t a b a r i s o n i

6 3 W o r K s

11 5 l i s t o F i l l u s t r a t i o n s

1 2 1 s e l e C t e d b i b l i o g r a P h y

1 2 5 P h o t o g r a P h i C C r e d i t s

MART’s president, Franco Bernabè, and I are privileged to present Morandi: Master of

Modern Still Life, organized in collaboration with The Phillips Collection. Since opening its

new site in 2002, MART has committed to developing relationships with cultural institu-

tions worldwide. Our first collaboration with the Phillips was in 2005, when we hosted its

masterpieces, opening the door to further joint projects. In September 2009, To See as

Artists See: American Masterworks from The Phillips Collection will open at MART, bring-

ing to Rovereto American works not otherwise seen in Italy.

After the successful 2008 Morandi retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

in New York, placing Morandi in historical and artistic perspective, Morandi: Master of

Modern Still Life, including forty works from MART and selected private Italian collections,

speaks in a quieter, less official voice about one of the most important Italian masters of

the twentieth century. In this way, it is entirely in keeping with the intimate atmosphere of

Duncan Phillips’s museum. Phillips purchased two paintings by the Bolognese master in

the 1950s, and this exhibition sets them in a larger context.

Both MART and the Phillips are expressions of a strong artistic vision on the part of great

collectors, and many of the works in this exhibition have been lent from private collections.

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to all the collectors who have made long term

loans of their Morandis to MART, especially Paola Giovanardi and Cristiana Aspesi Curti

Giovanardi, whose support of this museum is greatly appreciated. Augusto Giovanardi’s

heirs are to be commended for preserving his strong cultural vision and honoring his wish

to share his lifelong artistic enthusiasms. The Giovanardi Morandis are the core of this ex-

hibition. I would also like to thank the other collectors who have anonymously loaned their

precious works to this exhibition.

At the Phillips, I would like to thank Director Dr. Dorothy Kosinski, who shares my love for

Morandi’s silent poetry; Chief Curator Eliza Rathbone, who has managed the project with great

passion; and Chief Registrar Joseph Holbach, who has enthusiastically promoted this collabo-

ration since 2005. In Italy, I am deeply grateful to all the people who have helped to shape and

organize this exhibition, especially Enrico Vitali, Lorenza Selleri and the staff of Museo Morandi

in Bologna, and Massimo Di Carlo and Laura Lorenzoni of Galleria dello Scudo in Verona.

Gabriella BelliDirector, MART

f o r w a r d

In 1957, The Phillips Collection was the first American museum to hold a one-person

exhibition of work by Giorgio Morandi. It seems particularly fitting and exciting, therefore,

that this museum is the only venue in this country for Morandi: Master of Modern Still Life,

an exhibition born of our reciprocal relationship with MART, the Museo d’Arte Contempo-

ranea di Trento e Rovereto. Many of the paintings in this exhibition have never before been

seen in the United States and greatly enrich our understanding of Morandi’s stylistic evolu-

tion and achievement.

We treasure our blossoming association with MART and with our Italian colleagues, our

collaborators on this exhibition. I am grateful to MART’s director, Gabriella Belli, for making

it possible for us to present these exquisite examples of Morandi’s work in our galleries,

and to Elisabetta Barisoni, MART’s exhibition curator, for all her efforts to bring this exhibi-

tion into being. We are grateful to Flavio Fergonzi for the depth of knowledge of Morandi’s

work that he brings to his essay in this publication. Closer to home, I extend my deepest

thanks to the lenders in this country for sharing their beautiful paintings and etchings by

Morandi with us: the National Gallery of Art, the Smith College Museum of Art, the St.

Louis Art Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Virginia Museum of

Fine Arts, Robert and Aimee Lehrman, and Susan Paine. I am particularly grateful to Eliza

Rathbone, chief curator at the Phillips, for her hard work on the exhibition, and to Joseph

Holbach and Sarah Anderson in our registrar’s office for their attention to every detail re-

quired to make these loans possible. I would also like to thank Johanna Halford-MacLeod,

editor in chief, and to recognize Jelena Cuca, Elizabeth Nicholson, Sandra Schlachtmeyer,

and Daniel Yett for their work on this book. No exhibition is possible without financial sup-

port and we are exceedingly grateful to Fenner and Ina Milton for their generous gift to

this project and for their enthusiasm for returning Morandi’s unique work to a Washington

audience. We are also deeply indebted to Lockheed Martin for supporting this exhibition

and for its sustained support of The Phillips Collection.

Dorothy KosinskiDirector, The Phillips Collection

P r e f a c e

GiorGio Mor a ndi: CritiCisM, Cities, sourCes, series

F l av i o F e r g o n z i

1 3I n t e r P r e t at I o n s o f M o r a n d I at t h e t I M e o f h I s d e at h

Giorgio Morandi died in June 1964 at the age of

seventy-four, universally regarded as the greatest

italian painter of his time. the surviving masters of

italian modernism had been in decline for some time:

Giorgio de Chirico had abandoned any dialogue with

modern art and was painting neo-baroque pictures;

Carlo Carrà had devoted himself for decades to a light-

weight postimpressionism, as though regressing to

the consolation of some private nineteenth century. By

contrast, in the 1960s, Morandi’s paintings appeared

to be extraordinarily topical.

The sharpest critics, the most refined col-

lectors, and younger artists considered the

aging Bolognese master an exponent of the

most advanced painting. His invariably spare,

spatially ambiguous, monochrome still lifes

as well as his landscapes, with their endless

variations, were part of the Italian debate on

modern art. Significantly, Morandi’s glorifica-

tion by the critics and his greatest market suc-

cess took place in the last fifteen years of his

life, and not posthumously, as is frequently

the case with long-lived artists of repute.1 The

steps in this process occurred in the postwar

years: in 1948, Morandi won first prize for an

Italian painter at the Venice Biennale, the first

held in post-Fascist Italy; in 1957, he received

first prize at the São Paulo Biennale, in a close

contest with international abstract art; and in

1959, the presence of his work at Documenta

2 in Kassel facilitated comparisons with art in-

formel and abstract expressionism.

A summary of the most important critical

appraisals published in Italy in the year of Mo-

randi’s death makes a good starting point for

an assessment of his reputation. The views

of Lamberto Vitali, Francesco Arcangeli, Carlo

Ludovico Ragghianti, and Roberto Longhi re-

flect the accumulation of decades of ideas

that place him clearly in twentieth-century

Italian cultural history.

The first major book about Morandi ap-

peared in January 1964, published by Edizioni

del Milione.2 Morandi, who lived to see it, had

chosen the reproductions himself, checked

the quality of the color plates, and determined

what was included in the critical anthology.

Vitali, the author of the introduction, was a

key figure in Milan’s art world.3 A sophisti-

cated collector of old masters and modern

art and a writer on art, he made Morandi’s

acquaintance in the late 1920s and followed

his work, as a critic and, above all, as a collec-

tor, buying many crucial works, sometimes

directly from the artist. In 1957, Vitali pub-

lished a splendid edition of Morandi’s printed

works.4 In Vitali’s interpretation, Morandi the

painter is a solid, quiet, middle-class hero,

able to understand the major artistic revolu-

tions of the nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries and to draw fundamental lessons

1 4 1 5

from them through study of their represen-

tative works: from cubism, a radical analysis

of space; from metaphysical art, geometric

formal rigor; from abstract art, the tension in

framing a composition and imposing geometry

on it. But Morandi, according to Vitali, was

adept at keeping hold of the two tenets that

made him a great artist: first, the need for a

plastic style that could convey the volumetric

fullness and richness of light and shadow in

depicted objects; second, a stubborn faith-

fulness to the object under scrutiny. In the

context of Italian twentieth-century painting,

marked all too often by vague proclamations

and forays into literature and ideology (for ex-

ample, the futurists’ provocations, the dreary

return to tradition during the Fascist period,

the sterile controversy between social real-

ism and abstraction in the postwar years), Mo-

randi, according to Vitali, understood that “the

subject may be a mere figurative pretext,” and

his “deep exploration is a way – indeed may

be the only way – to achieve the result.”5

Vitali was not the first choice to write

the introduction to the 1964 publication.

Gino Ghiringhelli, director of the Galleria del

Milione, the artist’s exclusive agent in Italy,

and Morandi had picked Arcangeli. A young

art historian from Bologna, Arcangeli was a

pupil of Longhi, author of a 1961 monograph

on Morandi’s paintings and prints. Morandi ex-

pressed dissatisfaction with Arcangeli’s text,

especially where he argued against the criti-

cal ideas of Cesare Brandi and of Giulio Carlo

Argan, and he persuaded Milione to replace it

with one by Vitali.6 When Giulio Einaudi, Italy’s

most important cultural publisher, expressed

interest in Arcangeli’s essay, Morandi, know-

ing that its publication by Einaudi would mean

widespread distribution, blocked the effort by

insisting that Ghiringelli stick to the original

contract. Arcangeli’s essay, in a smaller edi-

tion, was published by Milione in July 1964, a

few months after the artist’s death.7 The text

immediately became a point of reference in

Italy, not only as regards a critical interpreta-

tion of Morandi, but also for the entire history

of twentieth-century art.

Arcangeli’s Morandi is a leading exponent

of his century’s European culture. Like the

poets T. S. Eliot and Eugenio Montale, he was

able to find in existential solitude an emotional

harmony in the humble artifacts of human

civilization. Like Paul Klee or Chaim Soutine,

he transformed his isolation into an active

dialectic with the rapid artistic and poetic de-

velopments in avant-garde art. His fifty years

as a painter entailed a descent into the deep-

est, unplumbed levels of consciousness. The

periods preferred by Arcangeli were those

(around 1922, 1930, and the years of World

War II) during which the solidity of Morandi’s

vision begins to crack, the colors become

duller, the drawing more uncertain, the chiar-

oscuro more exaggerated. In a series of well-

known pages by Arcangeli, the fracture of

Morandi’s pictorial unity and his expression

of a world of solitude and anxiety are associ-

ated with events that were distant, formally

and geographically, from the artist’s Bolo-

gna, where the artist had always worked.

His companions on the journey, according to

Arcangeli, were Wols and Jean Fautrier, Mark

Rothko and Nicolas de Staël. Morandi indig-

nantly rejected Arcangeli’s comparisons.

The most important comments on Vitali’s

book were made by Ragghianti, professor of

aesthetics and art history at the University of

Pisa, a political leader during Italy’s liberation

from Fascism, and Italian art criticism’s great-

est postwar champion of the philosophical

ideas of Benedetto Croce.8 In Critica d’arte,

the magazine he relaunched in 1954, Ragghi-

anti began a review of Vitali’s book by quoting

Morandi. In a 1957 radio interview intended

for Italians living in America, Morandi main-

tained, like Galileo, that: “The great book of

nature is written in mathematical language.

Its characters are triangles, circles and other

geometrical figures,” concluding, “Nothing is

more abstract than reality.”9 Reprising an idea

that he had expressed previously, Ragghianti

found geometric inspiration at Morandi’s po-

etic core10 and invited the reader to a “basic

architectural” analysis “of his paintings, with

plans and sections.”11 According to Ragghi-

anti’s interpretation, Morandi started from

“metric and syntactic intuitions” from which

the selection of the model, the spatial rela-

tionship between it and the composition on

1 6 1 7

the canvas, the control of the chiaroscuro, the

chromatic relationships, and even the form of

the brushstrokes followed logically. In other

words, Morandi tended toward geometric

abstraction and was related, in the twentieth

century, only to Piet Mondrian.

Morandi’s death was marked by a moving

obituary, broadcast on television by Longhi,

his contemporary and the most illustrious living

Italian art historian.12 (Morandi’s sisters, with

whom the artist lived all his life, later wrote

Longhi, saying that television was admitted

into their home only so that they could watch

the broadcast.)13 Thirty years earlier, conclud-

ing a memorable opening lecture of the aca-

demic year at Bologna University, Longhi set

Morandi in historical perspective, placing him

in the lineage of naturalistic Bolognese paint-

ing extending from Vitale da Bologna in the

fourteenth century to Giuseppe Maria Crespi

in the eighteenth.14 In 1945, Longhi interpret-

ed Morandi’s painting as a long inquiry into

natural appearance to the point of “stratifying

tonal memories.” According to Longhi, the sub-

ject per se did not matter much to Morandi;

what counted for him, as for Proust in A la

recherche du temps perdu, was the “degree of

penetration of the visual impression,” arising

from the subject at a purely spiritual level.15

Longhi titled the obituary, Exit Morandi, allud-

ing to the passing of not only an artist, but

also of the last generation of artists in the full

sense of the term. The key word in Longhi’s

text was “human”: the heights of Morandi’s

poetic achievements would be fully recognized

only when “a history that could be called civi-

lized, namely, one able to comprehend the

human dimension always expressed in an art-

ist’s work,”16 began to take the measure of

the arts of the past fifty years (from the avant-

garde onward). Moreover, Longhi observed

that a “capricious nemesis” had caused Mo-

randi to die on the same day that pop art was

exhibited in Italy for the first time, at the Ven-

ice Biennale, pop art being regarded by Longhi

as “inhuman” art par excellence.

To Vitali, Morandi was a champion of fidel-

ity to painting’s immutable rites, following

the gossamer thread of linguistic revolutions;

to Arcangeli, he was a witness to the tragic

condition of contemporary man; to Ragghianti,

a lucid spatial architect; to Longhi, the last

representative of an age in which painting

was still profoundly human. What did such

different interpretations have in common? In

celebrating Morandi, all of them evoked an

Italy that had never existed, or that had been

personified by only a tiny minority of Italians:

an Italy of consistent, thoughtful, cultivated

people, standing apart from, yet aware of,

the best contemporary culture, obsessively

focused on the quality of their own work, able

to look at themselves and their age with that

attitude that Longhi had magisterially defined

as “civil sadness.”

B o l o g n a , f l o r e n c e , f r I e n d s

Morandi’s fame as a painter spread in Italy

beyond a small circle of enthusiasts only in

1939, when he was assigned his own room

in the third Rome Quadriennale, an exhibition

of national importance. He chose to arrange

it as a thirty-year retrospective. A generation

of cultured Italians, accustomed to looking at

painting for the most part with tools derived

from Croce’s idealism, sprinkled, in the case

of the younger ones, with existentialism,

found in Morandi’s spare still lifes and un-

compromising Apennine landscapes a sort of

mute protest against the rhetorical humanism

professed by the Fascist regime.17

Before that date, Morandi was appreciated

by a few artists, literati, and art critics. His

paintings were bought by them and by the

occasional shrewd collector who sensed the

quality of his work and the possibility that it

might appreciate in value. Few of his admirers

were from Bologna, the city where Morandi

was born and lived. The majority were from

Florence, the city Morandi liked best for its ar-

tistic tradition and its intellectual debate that

had renewed an assertive Italian culture in

the years of La Voce magazine (1909–1916).

To Morandi, who hated travel and being away

from home, Florence offered the advantage

of being just a day trip from Bologna.

Although Longhi’s opening lecture of 1934

had identified Morandi as the last in an illustri-

ous lineage of Bolognese painters, the twenty-

year-old who emerged from the Accademia,

1 8 1 9

founded in 1584 by Ludovico Carracci, began

determinedly to look at Paul Cézanne, Henri

Rousseau, André Derain, and Pablo Picasso.

In a visit with Arcangeli to an exhibition of

the Baroque painter Guido Reni, Morandi ex-

pressed impatience and exasperation with the

pictorial mechanics of the Carracci tradition,

finding fault with its rhetoric and composi-

tional vagueness. By contrast, he appreciated

isolated segments of Reni’s work, such as

the depiction of Bologna at the base of the

Madonna of the Rosary and some of the rapid

work of the late, unfinished figure paintings.18

Morandi’s pictorial research, indeed, ran coun-

ter to that developed by the Carracci school.

The balance between naturalistic observation

and compositional re-invention typical of the

Bolognese tradition was far removed from

Morandi’s approach to painting, in which de-

sign, in its purer, architectural expression and

in its relationship to the proportions of the

canvas, always determines the poetic qual-

ity of the work. He opted for a severe, cold,

and intellectual form of painting, an ascetic

palette, painting that was the opposite of the

richer and more modulated recent Bolognese

tradition, represented by Luigi Bertelli’s land-

scapes and the refined postimpressionism of

Carlo Corsi.19

Almost unconsciously and by osmosis,

however, Morandi absorbed a crucial aspect

of Bologna’s pictorial tradition: recognition of

the primary importance of technique. Inferior

to the Florentines in drawing, to the Venetians

in color, and to the Romans in composition,

artists of the Bolognese school concentrated

on the techniques of painting and printmak-

ing and on the possibility of codifying these in

teachable form. Morandi, studying apparently

insignificant details of famous old masters and

modern works for lessons on chiaroscuro, or

the use of color, or composition, certainly

did not believe in the possibility of large-

scale figure paintings, believing instead in

the need for moderns to concentrate on the

lesser genres of still life and landscape. He

was above all a painter who, through thor-

ough technical investigation of a painting, re-

duced it to its purest elements, to the point

where he could then use it for his own work.

Morandi’s studio, Bologna

2 0 2 1

Morandi amassed a wealth of knowledge by

scrutinizing the technique of the great mas-

ters. The knowledge was technical, not stylis-

tic: in other words, his approach ran counter

to the “return to the craft” espoused by Carrà

and de Chirico who, between 1919 and 1920,

quoted visually and stylistically from Giotto or

late fifteenth-century artists, and – in the case

of de Chirico – began copying the originals of

the great masters in museums.

Bologna was perfect for Morandi’s way of

working. The cultural and major visual sources

were elsewhere. His studio on via Fondazza

allowed him to decant them and adapt them to

the tempo of a tranquil life, without the shocks

and scandals of modernity. It was a place

where he could study modern painting, pas-

sionately and skeptically, in black-and-white

reproductions, question its deepest purpose,

and judge it with needed detachment.

From the outset, Morandi’s Bolognese

friends devotedly cultivated his myth: that of

a silent, irritable, often sarcastic artist, with

old-fashioned passions and reserve; an artist

whose qualities the non-Bolognese (Carrà, de

Chirico, Ardengo Soffici, Cipriano Efisio Oppo,

Luigi Bartolini) discovered only over time, as-

sociating them closely with the antimodern

climate permeating the city: fourteenth-cen-

tury churches, low porticos, brick houses,

quiet workshops, at a time when modern

architecture and the rhythms of industrial and

commercial life were starting to overwhelm

city centers elsewhere in Italy. When the

Bolognese, including those best informed

about international modern art, wrote about

him, they too stressed Morandi’s “Bolognese-

ness.” His closest friend, Leo Longanesi, a

restless literary man and cultural promoter,

who published Morandi’s paintings in 1928 in

a Bolognese periodical, L’Italiano, established

an interpretation that took hold: “To see one

of his pictures is to know his character, his

family, his home, his street, his town. His col-

ors, lightly veiled in dust, are those of a modest

Bologna, a Bologna of quiet streets and earth-

toned shops, bakeries, groceries, and objects

discarded by people who live in the center of

town. His is the delicate, weightless light that

filters into his street.”20

This cliché, which soon spread in Bologna

and beyond, had obvious limits: it aimed to

drag Morandi into the antimodern, anti-French

debate that was fashionable at the time in

Italian cultural and political circles. Morandi

was not put out by this, however, because he

felt protected in his role of painter anchored

to the reality of things, in tune with a certain

indolent and conservative character typical of

the Bolognese. He knew that the quality of his

painting sufficed to make him exceptional.

In contrast to Bologna, at least until the end

of the 1930s, Florence was Morandi’s main

link with the mediators of modernity. There,

he could study the frescoes of Giotto, Masac-

cio, and Paolo Uccello in the original and try to

find a link between them and the wide-eyed,

felt vision of Rousseau. At the Uffizi, he could

compare his own work with the great master-

pieces of the Renaissance and study the self-

portraits he loved in the Vasari Corridor. At

the Seeber and Ferrante Gonnelli bookstores,

he could find the latest publications on French

art. Florence was also the place where, from

1908, Soffici’s critical message had emerged,

imparting to Italian artists the lessons of

French impressionism, of Cézanne and Rous-

seau, of Georges Braque and Picasso, as the

leading shapers of modernity, contrasted with

the babel of historical and symbolist revivals

of the Venice Biennials. In addition, Florence

was home to the Alinari photographic studio,

where Morandi could order the photographs

of works of art that were his principal school

of painting over the years. Starting in the mid-

1920s, it was to Florence that artists and crit-

ics associated with Il Selvaggio gravitated. In

this elitist periodical, with its anti-bourgeois

tone and its promulgation of antiurban and

antiauthoritarian “original” Fascism, Morandi

found his first true supporters: Mino Maccari,

Achille Lega, Sandro Volta, and Soffici pro-

moted his painted work, but were especially

keen on his prints, at a time when he was iso-

lated, without contacts and without sales.21

In Morandi, the Florentines saw an ex-

ample of “peasant” adherence to painting

the real. They recognized his contact with

the great Italian artistic tradition and his

ability to sublimate realism into classicism.

2 2 2 3

Soffici’s words of 1932, were typical:

“Equilibrium is finally achieved. The sub-

stantial truth, the absolute sincerity, the normal

and thus human vision of poetic reality work

together to animate the schema devised by

will and science. The result is a perfect artis-

tic organism, full and vital, and therefore of

an exemplary and classical nature. By this I

mean classical in the Italian manner: that is,

simultaneously real and ideal, objective and

subjective, traditional.” 22

Soffici as critic, declared Fascist, promoter

– after 1920 – of a return to a proudly antimod-

ernist Italian tradition, was one thing; Soffici

as connoisseur of painting was quite another.

In 1931, at the first Rome Quadriennale, he

bought two of three paintings exhibited by

Morandi.23 This purchase marked a decisive

step in Morandi’s critical fortune. In the few

pages devoted to Morandi in the Quadrienn-

nale, it is worth recalling the words of Nino

Bertocchi, a Bolognese painter and later a

winner of the sought-after critics’ prize, de-

scribing his fellow townsman as a petit maître

with a modernist mania who painted with a

“greasy, oily, messy painterly matter” and

who, to please the snobs of the moment, had

“smothered emotion and created the imbal-

ances that prevent a work of art from acquir-

ing the magic of unique creations.”24 In this

context, Soffici’s purchase was a clear and

far-reaching statement. The most respected

judge of modern painting, here he was buy-

ing work with visionary and expressionist

stylistic connotations that ran counter to his

own ideas. What is more, Soffici did not buy

directly from the artist at a discount; he paid

the official exhibition prices (Lit 3,500 each,

for the two works, the price of his own works

at the same exhibition).

Soffici’s purchase of the two Morandis

marked the start of the race for Florence’s

cultured men to buy Morandi’s paintings and

to write about him as the artist who came

closest to the anxiety of modern Italian poetry,

Montale and the hermetic poets. The real shift

in the perception of Morandi’s greatness in Ita-

ly, from technically impeccable petit maître to

universal artist, the standard for contemporary

Italian painting, took place with the support

of the Florentine literati. In September 1937

a whole issue of Il Frontespizio was devoted

to Morandi, indicating the painless shift that

had taken place, as refined Catholics replaced

the peasant-like Fascists of Il Selvaggio as

his supporters. At the end of the decade, in

1939, another Tuscan writer and art historian,

Cesare Brandi, wrote the first essay in which

Morandi’s painting was studied in terms of its

formal values. 25

V I s u a l s o u r c e s

At the age of little more than twenty, Morandi

understood that painting – old master paint-

ing, but above all modern painting – was to

be looked at by concentrating on the formal

grammar of the picture, those mysterious laws

that constituted its most profound essence,

from the unusual detail (the bond between

one brushstroke and another, between a light-

filled field and a darker one) to the overall

balance of the composition. This approach

was unusual in Italy in1910. For decades, the

question of the subject and particularly the

mood it was to evoke in the viewer had been

the dominant question. The divisionists had

placed the depiction of light split into its com-

ponents at the service of the social or spiritual

content of the picture. The futurists concen-

trated on painting’s linguistic aspects only

after noticing, in 1912, their backwardness in

relation to cubist modernity; prior to this, be-

tween 1910 and 1911, their main preoccupa-

tion had been the provocatively anti-academic

depiction of visual mythologies arising out of

Marinetti’s writings.

From the time he began painting in 1911,

Morandi, by contrast, canceled out the ques-

tion of the subject, reducing it to still life,

landscape and, occasionally, self-portraiture.

It is important to bear in mind that the works

he studied were almost always black-and-

white reproductions, often of modest quality:

the slender volumes from Libreria della Voce,

a few illustrations from Biennale catalogues,

occasional plates from art periodicals were his

access to what was going on internationally.

For a long time, these remained his preferred

sources.26 The print resolution of photographs

in magazines, with their screen, grain, and

2 52 4

uncertain focus, and Morandi’s capacity to

concentrate on an insignificant detail in order

to isolate its chiaroscuro rhythm or graphic

themes should always be considered when

thinking about his approach to these sources.

In the silence of his studio, book illustrations

allowed Morandi a more intense and personal

reading of the work than was possible in an

exhibition or museum. Absence of color did

not strip visual information from the original,

but instead gave him greater autonomy and

freedom of observation.

The 1914 still life with bottle, box, book,

jug, two-panel mirror, and chest of drawers in

the background (<3a = # 2> page XX),27 is an

anthology of motifs from the tradition of mod-

ernist or cubist still life. The jug and bottle,

in fact, appear in one of the rare sources of

visual information on modern French painting

then available in Italy: an illustration of a Still

Life of 1912 by Derain in Du cubisme by Albert

Gleizes and Jean Metzinger.28 The jug placed

next to an open book appears in a 1908 paint-

ing by Braque, Still Life with Coffee Pot (page

22, fig. 1),29 and the compositional device of

a book or musical score framing the picture

at the top was used by Braque often in the

early cubist years. Even the language of per-

spectival “mistakes” and spatial discontinuity

in the picture can be traced to cubist sourc-

es, including works by Picasso that Morandi

would have known from reproductions.

What is it that insures that Morandi’s paint-

ing of 1914 is not simply a medley of cub-

ist motifs but is instead a powerfully expres-

sive work? His still life does not share the

impassivity of those of Braque and Picasso.

Through strong foreshortening from above,

Morandi has emphasized the dramatic rush

of objects toward the spectator. The corner

of the furniture projects forward, the diptych

leans toward the jug, the horizontal base on

which the objects rest tilts toward the fore-

ground, making a strong visual wedge of the

box and book. The brushstrokes are delib-

erate: rapid, thick strokes of luminous paint

suggest the emergence of the corner of

the furniture, the reflecting surfaces of the

diptych and the bottle. This process recalls

some theoretical principles of futurism: here,

the artist seems to put into practice a sug-

gestion from Soffici to the futurists: “deform-

ing an object in accordance with its individual

lighting and the influence of the surrounding

objects” to depict “a movement of volumes

and surfaces in vital synthetic competition.”30

Cubist painting (or, rather, duotone reproduc-

tions of cubist paintings) served Morandi as a

basic language; having acquired it, he tried to

work independently on problems then being

debated in Italy.

Morandi was isolated in the Italian art world

when, in 1918, he began painting pictures that

manifest a rarified, mysterious atmosphere,

akin to the metaphysics of de Chirico and

Carrà.31 Morandi did not know these artists

personally, but two illustrations of their works

published in the Bolognese periodical La

Raccolta, edited by

Giuseppe Raimondi,32

gave him the opportu-

nity to appreciate their

perspectival am-bigui-

ties and their simul-

taneously solid sug-

gestion of space. He

immediately incor-po-

rated these in his new work. However, what

revolutionized this period of Morandi’s work

was the attention he paid to the mixed-media

works by Picasso, illustrated in 1913 in an issue

of Les Soirées de Paris.33 One of these reliefs,

known today as Bottle and Guitar (page 23,

fig. 2) (but illustrated in Apollinaire’s periodical

with the title of Nature morte), seems to have

1

2

2 6 2 7

fascinated Morandi. In his paintings of 1918,

he placed Picasso’s box with its mixed-media

wooden frame directly in front of the viewer.

Borrowing again from

Picasso, Morandi de-

picted an ambiguous

space, (page 24, fig.

3) in which it is hard

to establish the exact

position of the objects

shown. Using the cold,

precise fields gleaned

from reproductions of

the work of de Chirico

or Carrà, Morandi sought to neutralize their

narrative, using Picasso’s provocative real-

ism. The metaphysical paintings of 1918–

1919 offer another bold example of Morandi’s

deliberate use of very different sources. In

the series of still lifes dating from late 1919,

(<#4> page XX), Morandi evidently studied

Cézanne’s large still lifes of the 1880s (page

24, fig. 4), in books by Ambroise Vollard and

Bernheim-Jeune published in 1914. He chose

to depict Cézanne’s motif in a contrasting

style, influenced by

the dominant gray

of Giotto’s frescoes

which he had seen in

Florence, and by the

alienating, dramatic

chiaroscuro of Cara-

vaggio and his followers, whom Longhi was

publishing at the time.34 Reaching maturity, in

Morandi’s case, meant becoming stylistically

independent of his sources, even those he

loved and respected most.

For Morandi, the salient feature of

the 1920s was his discovery of the

still lifes of Jean-Siméon Chardin.

Morandi’s golden still life of 1923 with an

overturned funnel at the center (<#14> page

XX) displays some characteristics of Char-

din’s still-life paintings: the intimacy between

painter and object resulting from its intense

contemplation and the artist’s attraction to

everyday objects as evidence of honest, pre-

cise work. Morandi observed Chardin closely,

again using black-and-white reproductions,

but rarely quoted literally from the French

master’s work. Instead, he looked for poetry

in closed spaces, dark corners animated by

flashes of light and reflections, in echoes of

Chardin’s compositional motifs and chiar-

oscuro devices. In the Still Life of 1923 the

close cropping of the round table repeats that

in Chardin’s Table d’office (page 25, fig. 5), a

painting reproduced in Edmond Pilon’s 1909

monograph on Chardin.35 Morandi’s shift from

a passion for Cézanne to one for Chardin in

the 1920s represents more than a formal

choice. Passing from Cézanne’s sharp focus,

theatrical arrangement of objects, and artifi-

cial spatial layout, to Chardin’s more modu-

lated approach to chiaroscuro and space re-

veals a desire for a more active, emotional

response to the objects and the atmosphere

surrounding them.

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot became Mo-

randi’s favorite source for landscape during

the 1920s and 1930s. The critical re-appraisal

of Corot in Italy and France at the time pre-

sented him not as a Romantic landscapist but

as a sort of nineteenth-century Nicolas Pous-

sin, a classicist who based his work on prin-

ciples of compositional and structural logic.36

As is quite evident from a 1941 landscape

(<#21> page XX), what Morandi admired in

Corot’s work (page 25, fig. 6) – seen in re-

production and, occasionally, in the original37

– was his revolutionary ability to animate

motifs from nature that were inexpressive in

themselves, highlighting the pure relationship

between tones, particularly in his small-scale

works. From Corot, Morandi acquired techni-

cal information, learning about brushstrokes

and impasto and their relationship to space.

3

4

5

2 8 2 9

He deduced the compositional themes (the

link to the background of the houses, reduced

to geometric solids) and chromatic ones

(the dominant gray tone), and, above all, he

echoed Corot’s impassive vision, conferring

an unexpected solemnity on his own work.

From the period of his full stylistic maturity,

between the end of the 1930s and the early

1940s, Morandi began to use pictorial sources

in a different way. The compositional skills he

had gained and his undiminished concentra-

tion on the techniques of the masters of the

past led him to study their smallest motifs

and include them in his own work. Perhaps

the most interesting example arises from

his relationship with Piero della Francesca.

Longhi’s essential monograph, published in

1927, placed Piero at the center

of Italian Renaissance studies.

According to Longhi, the artist

had invented the perspectival

synthesis of form and color, and

the book’s illustrations provided

a rich series of details of Piero’s

panels and frescoes, cropped

from a modernist point of view.

For this reason they were of

particular interest to artists of the 1920s

and 1930s.38 If the black-and-white plates in

Longhi’s book did not provide Morandi with

direct models, they certainly supplied him

with suggestions for design and chiaroscuro.

By the 1950s, many critics stressed the paral-

lel between the luminous and plastic quality of

recent Morandis and that of Piero, once again

fashionable among modern artists. In a telling

example, two long bottles from a still life of

1939 (V. 245) (page 26, fig. 7) evoke the folds

of the mantle of the Madonna della Miseri-

cordia (page 27, fig. 8 and detail), shown as a

detail in Longhi’s monograph. This and other

comparisons speak to Morandi’s constant

interrogation of the plates in art books, and

his ability to isolate apparently insignificant

details.

PaIntIngs In serIes

Anyone leafing through Vitali’s 1977 cata-

logue raisonné of Morandi’s paintings must

be struck by the succession of pages of still

lifes and landscapes in which the differences

between one painting and the next are mini-

mal. In the still lifes, an object may be added

or removed, or shown at a different size, or lit

differently. In the landscapes, the same motif

may be cropped differently or observed from

a slightly different angle. Only by comparing

works in the original is it possible to under-

stand this process fully. Tone and execution

change noticeably with each variant. These

slight variations were not made to assure the

uniqueness of the pictures for the market. As

Longhi stated, in varying the motif, Morandi

was involved in “rendering noticeably differ-

ent timbres,” in harmonizing “his severe lu-

minous elegy.”39

Recent exhibitions of Morandi have assem-

bled works in series.40 Obsessive repetition

of a motif made him seem an unexpectedly

modern painter, almost a conceptual artist

avant le mot, inviting

the observer to con-

centrate on the paint-

erly quality of individual

paintings. We know

little about Morandi’s

series. In his rare state-

6

7

8 and detail

3 0 3 1

ments, the artist provided no explanation for

his progression by means of tiny variations,

and there are no eyewitness reports that of-

fer any information on the sequence of these

series. In his catalogue, Vitali, who visited

Morandi over a long period, tends to place the

sparest still lifes last in a series, suggesting a

progression by subtraction. Morandi scholars

in Italy have explored the cultural precedents

of this practice more than they have the

painterly reasons behind it. In 1941, Massimo

Bontempelli, a fashionable writer, evoked as

precedents Johann Sebastian Bach’s suites

for cello and Petrarch’s sonnets from his Can-

zoniere.41 The comparison with Petrarch took

hold, and Arcangeli pointed to the more intel-

lectual sestinas.42

In arranging the illustrations for the 1964

monograph, Morandi placed the 1914 Still

Life (<#2 is 3a> page XX) first and, five illus-

trations later, a painting that is today at the

Musée national d’art moderne, Paris (V. 18).

It is clear how, in the latter, he picked up the

central motif again, presenting it in an un-

usual vertical format. The variations progress

toward more abstract painting, in which the

empty spaces have the same weight as the

objects and the brushwork is lighter and more

airy. This process of abstraction from the ini-

tial motif did not stop here. In a work of 1915

(V. 23), Morandi made a significant break: no-

ticeably lowering the point of view, he con-

centrated on the objects in the foreground,

adding a strange, domestic object, a mantel

clock seen from the rear. The background

was thus changed into a series of wings, and

the result was a new and alienating immobil-

ity, without the plastic tensions that animated

the two preceding pictures. An etching of the

same year provides a mirror image of some

of the elements in the painting: some objects

have been eliminated (the two-panel mirror);

others re-introduced from earlier paintings

(the bottle with bulging neck) or from a con-

temporary drawing (the compartments of the

crockery cupboard shown in mirror image);

others added (to the right, an unidentifiable

vegetable, perhaps a tuft of cardoon or cel-

ery). Here Morandi stopped: for the first time

all objects in one of his still lifes are aligned

against the backdrop, absorbing the forceful

advance of the central elements common to

all the pictures in the series. In terms of spa-

tial control and abstract capability, the print

was considered a milestone worthy of pub-

lication, and it was delivered to Raimondi for

reproduction in the April 15, 1918, issue of La

Raccolta.

An interesting example of two paintings in

series is that of the 1916 still lifes catalogued

by Vitali as numbers 28 and 29. Morandi kept

the first of these (page 28, fig. 9) for a long

time before selling it to a Brescian collector,

Pietro Feroldi, around 1938. The second (page

28, fig. 10) by contrast, entered a collection

early. Sold in 1919 to a publisher, Marco Bro-

glio, it toured Germany in 1921 in a series of

exhibitions on recent Italian art. Currently, it

is impossible to be certain which of the two

still lifes was realized first. In June and July

1916, Morandi was working on flattening ob-

jects and on reducing them to outlines. The

radical reduction of space and objects to an

inlay of flat notations in V. 29 might suggest a

later execution than for the more elaborated,

chiaroscuro of V. 28. However, the fact that

Morandi reworked some paintings of 1916

before exhibiting them in Germany, giving

them the dense ground of his later metaphys-

ical paintings, perhaps explains the difference

in style between the two paintings. A recent

reflectographic examination of V. 28 provides

two important pieces of information. The first

is that Morandi planned to include a fourth ob-

ject, a bottle placed behind the fruit bowl. The

bottle was never painted, although the artist

reserved a space for it in the background be-

fore unifying the whole space with a layer of

gray-blue paint. The second is that Morandi

arrived at the solution of the four bands of

9 and 10

3 2 3 3

the background only while the work was in

progress; initially, he had wanted to suggest

the surface of the table in a more realistic

manner via a vertical break on the right, just

beyond the base of the fruit bowl. As he pre-

pared to paint this picture, therefore, Morandi

started with an idea of a more crowded com-

position, with somewhat more voluminous

objects. Only while working on it did he arrive

at a more unusual, two-dimensional solution.

This hypothetical progression, in which the

artist began working on a canvas based on

solutions perfected in the preceding picture,

only to change them as the work proceeded,

might indicate that V. 28 comes after V. 29.

His attempt at innovation in V. 28 may have

been less popular with the first buyer, who

chose V. 29.

The large Still Life (V. 114) with two white

bottles and a lamp with its intense blue base

standing out against the warm, brownish

tones of the canvas (page 31, fig. 11), was

painted in 1923, and was the most important

work in a year that was one of desperate iso-

lation for Morandi. For this picture, he chose

an ambitious square format and unusually

large dimensions (60 x 60 cm), compared to

the other still lifes of the same period. He

constructed an arrangement of stable objects

like a piece of architecture. By contrast, he

painted it with tremulous brushwork and suf-

fused chiaroscuro. Six years separate this

picture from another, equally large still life, V.

143, with a few variations that barely alter the

general composition (page 31, fig. 12): objects

rising in a curve toward the center and echo-

ing the opposing curve of the table’s outline.

What changes radically, however, is the appli-

cation of the paint (thicker and more worked),

the chiaroscuro (dominated by cruder flashes

of light) and, above all, the chromatic balance.

More acid contrasts replace the refined tonal

impasto of the earlier work. Here, Morandi in-

serted strong luminous reflections from the

bottles and added pink to the teapot, creating

a tonal break in addition to the one caused

by the blue of the lamp. In this case, the re-

turn to an earlier composition appears to have

been driven by the desire to try new possi-

bilities of execution. Starting from an estab-

lished compositional scheme that could be

modified with just a few changes, Morandi

was able to operate confidently in his effort

to produce a completely different work with a

rougher impastoed surface.

In the late 1920s, Morandi’s returns to

earlier compositions were often associated

with his work as a printmaker. Stimulated by

translating a painting into a dense thicket of

etched lines, it was natural for him to attempt

a parallel revision of it in paint. As is known

from a series of letters from Morandi to

Soffici,43 in early 1929 Morandi acquired some

photographs of his own works that had been

sold to Broglio. Seeing a photograph of a cru-

cial, long-forgotten painting evidently caused

him to review and reinterpret it in a new chiar-

oscuro and chromatic key.

At times, Morandi’s return to an earlier

composition took place with a stylistic innova-

tion and also through the repetition of a motif,

an isolated detail taking on its own identity.

In 1940, Morandi chose a motif of houses

on the hills of Grizzana, and began a series

of views in a style like Corot’s. He probably

started with the widest view (V. 270) (page

32, fig. 13) and then narrowed the compo-

sitional frame, tackling the landscape with a

more rapid, feathered brushstroke, and then

zoomed in, locking in a composition domi-

nated by the faceted planes of the houses,

which stand out more sharply against the hill-

side. Working like an abstract artist, seeking

the most stable and harmonious composi-

tion, Morandi had found the essence of the

view. In the summer of 1941, he returned to

the motif, eliminating many of the tonal and

chiaroscuro complexities of the 1940 pictures

(V.332) (page 32, fig. 14). Now, the houses

were reduced to solids, their facades becom-

ing marquetry in the surface of the painting.

11 and 12

3 4 3 5

The variants might now incorporate the wide

view and the disposition of the paint on the

canvas, but in all cases the dominant sty-

listic feature, simplified houses reduced to

pure volumes, was retained. Morandi’s next

step was to narrow his focus, eliminating the

horizon line, turning the landscape into an

arabesque of simple zones of color. At this

point, he was able to make his final move,

completely transfiguring the motif (V. 343)

(page 32, fig. 15) by changing the viewpoint

and ensuring a contrast between the facades

of the houses and the blinding white of the

sunlit earth.

The 1940s and 1950s saw the creation of

the largest series with the fewest variants.

The 1952 series with the yellow cloth (<#36>

page XX) has become legendary for its re-

fined tones and balanced compositions and

these ten paintings were immediately much

sought after by collectors.44 As drawings for

this series show, Morandi’s final innovation

came when he drastically raised the view-

point, giving the cloth significant three-dimen-

sionality and making it the key element in the

painting.45 The pictorial series then developed

without the usual variations in the cropping of

the image and arrangement of the elements.

Indeed, the frontal presentation of the objects

never changes, and neither, generally, does

the artist’s viewpoint or his distance from the

setup. Moreover, there are few variations on

the combination of items present. Morandi

substituted a green cylindrical box (V. 831)

(page 33, fig. 16) for a basket lined in paper

(V. 824) (page 33, fig. 17), adding or removing

a white ceramic container on the right. Given

the largely fixed nature of the composition,

the proportions of Morandi’s canvases, rang-

ing from distinctly horizontal to square, are

particularly important. Light falling from the

front reveals to close inspection slight differ-

ences that prove to be the most significant

motif for investigation in the entire series: the

light source seems to vary from right, to cen-

ter, to left. Morandi adopted two dominant

tones: a cool one, with pearl gray and greens,

when the object behind is the green box,

and a warm one, with straw yellow, ocher,

and amber tones, when the lined basket is

used. But these two elements do not seem

to be determined or otherwise influenced

by changes in the light source. In the subse-

quent series, Morandi eliminated the cloth,

13

16

14

17

15

3 6 3 7

while retaining the other objects and creating

a glaring void between the cylindrical vase on

the left and the decorated jug on the right.

He then balanced the composition by the ad-

dition of a paper box on the far right (V. 904)

(page 34, fig. 18) or by the inclusion of a coni-

cal vase on the left, or by shifting the cup in

the foreground.

In the series with the yellow cloth, it is not

possible to offer a credible hypothesis for the

order in which the pictures were painted. For

another, no less important, series of still lifes,

an answer emerges from a study of the docu-

ments. In 1954, Morandi worked on crowded

compositions of boxes, bowls, and small bot-

tles set in a horizontal rectangle (V. 895–899)

(<#40 V. 896 = page XX and page 35, fig. 19).

Almost all these still lifes are emphatically

horizontal in format, echoing the arrange-

ment of the objects, and they

are painted with thin paint and

rapid brushstrokes. Only one

(fig. 19) is almost square and

its medium is more compact,

almost lacquered.

On July 26, 1953, Morandi wrote to Curt

Valentin that he had “almost finished the

extended-format picture similar to those by

Braque and [Joan] Miró in your possession. It

measures 40 x 20 cm.” The painting (<#38>

page XX) is now in the Phillips Collection in

Washington. On November 18, he added that

he had “four paintings (still lifes) ready for

you,” and that he was, “already working on

the still life measuring 70 x 25 cm you asked

for in your letter.”46 This painting (V. 904 4o),

dated to 1954 in Vitali’s catalogue raisonné,

should therefore be attributed to the previous

year. Its liquid paint, acid yellow, and compo-

sition are also to be found in paintings that

certainly date from 1953. A label from the Gal-

leria del Milione on V. 874 (<#39> page XX)

provides a firm terminus ante quem. Starting

with V. 904, one need only vary the compo-

nents slightly, substituting the cigar box for

the two boxes on the left, a soup bowl for the

central cup, and double the motif on the right

of the small bottle and soup bowl, to see the

coherent development of the horizontal paint-

ings (<#40> page XX). The square painting (V.

895) is thus the last in the series. Starting with

the horizontals of 1953, Morandi decided in a

single case to widen the view to include the

ample portions of the outline of the table and

of the background. The preparatory drawings

for two of these paintings are dated: 1954 on

the drawing in which the artist studied the

square still life, 1953 on the pencil study for

the horizontal painting commissioned by Curt

Valentin.47

Morandi’s series offer clues to his way of

working. He always seems to have started

from a perfectly balanced and harmonious

composition, produced through lengthy study

and rearrangement of objects as well as from

his own drawings. Continuing from the first

painting in a series, he researched new har-

monies. The paintings that followed were

produced in reference to, and in the presence

of, the earlier ones. Photographs of Morandi’s

studio show the rearranged objects on the ta-

ble and some paintings from the same series

on the wall. In this set of relationships lies

the significance of Morandi’s series. The last

painting in a series is often the most radical

experiment: objects may become difficult to

recognize, landscapes may become fields of

color, spatial relationships may only be sug-

gested; or, by contrast, the rendering may be

precise and spatial definition may sharpen,

so that the composition achieves maximum

clarity. With each subsequent variation in a

series, Morandi pursued a specific line of pic-

torial inquiry to its ultimate conclusion. 18

19

3 9f o o t n o t e s

16–8 (on monographs published by libreria della voce); arcangeli, Giorgio Morandi, 13, 21 (on how Morandi in 1960 still pored over illustrated plates of works by renoir and a 1912 essay by lucie Cousturier; in F. Fergonzi, “on some of giorgio Morandi’s visual sources,” Giorgio Morandi 1890–1964 (new york: Metropolitan Museum of art / Milan: skira, 2008) i discuss how Morandi studied a reproduction of an el greco altarpiece, a point mentioned in g. raimondi, Anni con Giorgio Mo-randi (Milan: Mondadori, 1970), 97.

27. the still life is catalogued in l. vitali, Morandi. Catalogo generale (Milan: electa, 1977; expanded edition, 1983, 13). henceforth Vitali 13.

28. the work is catalogued in M. Keller-mannn, André Derain. Catalogue rai-sonné de l’ oeuvre peint 1, 1895–1914 (Paris: galerie schmit, 1992), no. 286; a. gleizes, J. Metzinger, Du cubisme, (Paris: Figuière, 1912).

29. the work is catalogued in n. Worms de romilly and J. laude, braque. Le cubisme, fin 1907–1914 (Paris: Maeght, 1982), no. 8.

30. a. soffici, Cubismo e futurismo (Flor-ence: libreria della voce, 1914), p.66.

31. these are Vitali 13 37 (today in saint Petersburg, hermitage), 38 (to-day in Milan, Civiche raccolte d’arte, Jucker collection) and 39 (today in rome, galleria nazionale d’arte Mod-erna), all dated 1918 on the canvas.

32. these are a drawing by Carrà, which at the time belonged to giuseppe raimondi, catalogued in Carrà. Disegni, ed. M. Carrà and F. russoli (bologna: graphis, 1977), no. 283, and a paint-ing by de Chirico (today in a private collection) catalogued in P. baldacci, De

Chirico 1888–1919. La metafisica (Milan: leonardo, 1997), no.132 under the title Natura morta evangelica (II).

33. P. Fossati, Storie di figure e di im-magini. Da Boccioni a Licini, (turin: ein-audi, 1995): 162–5. Les Soirées de Paris had probably been known to Morandi for some time, as it was sent by boccioni in January 1914 to young bolognese artists.

34. before traveling to rome in august 1919, Morandi sought “those issues of Arte” in libraries, but with no luck, in order to find out “where there are some pictures by gentileschi and bor-gianni” [letter from giorgio Morandi to giuseppe raimondi, 24 July 1919, in g. raimondi, Anni con Giorgio Morandi (Milan: Mondadori, 1970),186]. in all probability, these are the issues of L’Arte containing articles by r. longhi: “orazio borgianni” l’arte 17 (1914): 7–23 and “gentileschi padre e figlia” L’Arte 19 (1916): 245-314.

35. e. Pilon, Chardin (Paris: Plon, 1909), 56.

36. see, for example, t. daubler, “nos-tro retaggio. Parte terza,” Valori Plastici 2, 1–2 (January–February 1920): 19; r. bissière, “notes sur Corot,” L’Esprit Nouveau 9 (1921): 1005–6; C. e. oppo, Corot (rome: valori Plastici, 1925), 5.

37. a good selection of Corot’s italian landscapes was presented at the third biennale of rome, which Morandi attended, Terza Biennale Romana. Es-posizione Internazionale di Belle Arti. Catalogo (rome, 1925), 16–48; at some time close to the creation of Vitali 13 333, Morandi studied some Corots owned by a collector from Prato, a fact that emerges in letters from Morandi to ardengo soffici dated 7 november 1941, 18 January 1942, and 13 october 1942 published in “A Prato per vedere i Corot,” 130, 133, 136.

38. r. longhi, Piero della Francesca (rome: valori Plastici, 1927); Piero della Francesca e il Novecento. Prospettiva, spazio, luce, geometria, pittura murale, tonalismo 1920–1938, ed. M. M. lamberti and M. Fagiolo dell’arco (venice: Mar-silio, 1991); n. rowley, “a light without Color: giorgio Morandi and Piero della Francesca,” Giorgio Morandi 1890–1964.

39. longhi, “Morandi al ‘Fiore’,” 96.

40. Morandi ultimo.

41. M. bontempelli, “giorgio Morandi,” Corriere della Sera (20 august 1941).

42. F. arcangeli, “novità di Morandi,” Il Mondo (5 october 1946).

43. letters from Morandi to soffici, 29 december 1928 and 21 March 1929, in “A Prato per vedere i Corot,” 78–81; concerning the dating of the vitali 13 114 still life to 1923 (and not 1926, as proposed by vitali) see F. Fergonzi, “un contratto inedito tra giorgio Mo-randi e Mario broglio: identificazioni delle opere, storia collezionistica e no-vità cronologiche del Morandi metafisi-co e postmetafisico,” Saggi e Memorie di Storia dell’Arte 26 (2003): 481–2; this date was used by M. C. bandera in Giorgio Morandi 1890–1964.

44. vitali numbered them 822–832, cataloguing one of them twice: 823 and 829. see Morandi ultimo, 130–41.

45. M. Pasquali, e. tavoni, Morandi. Disegni. Catalogo generale, catalogazi-one scientifica, datazione e confronti iconografici, ed. M. Pasquali with l. selleri (Milan: electa, 1994), nos. 1952/2, 7, 9, 10.

46. Parts of these letters were pub-lished in Morandi ultimo, 154–6.

47. Pasquali, tavoni, Morandi. Disegni, nos. 1953/24, 1954/1.

1. For biographical and critical accounts of Morandi during the post-war period, see Morandi ultimo. Nature morte 1950–1964, ed. l. Mattioli rossi (Milan: Mazzotta, 1997); for more on the market for Morandi’s work in the last years of his life, see F. Fergonzi, “dagli ‘ac-quirenti amici’ alla ‘lista di attesa per un quadro’: un primo profilo del collezion-ismo morandiano” in Giorgio Morandi. Collezionisti e amici, ed. a. bernardini (Milan, geneva: skira, 2008): 17–30.

2. l. vitali, Giorgio Morandi pittore (Milan: edizioni del Milione, 1964).

3. For more on lamberto vitali, see Un milanese che parlava toscano. Lam-berto Vitali e la sua collezione (Milan: Pinacoteca di brera/electa, 2001).

4. l. vitali, Giorgio Morandi. Opera grafica (turin: einaudi, 1957).

5. vitali, Giorgio Morandi pittore, 41.

6. P. Mandelli, “storia di una monogra-fia,” Accademia Clementina. Atti e memorie 35–6 (1996): 315–35; F. arcangeli, Giorgio Morandi, with origi-nal and new text, ed. l. Cesari (turin: allemandi, 2007).

7. F. arcangeli, Giorgio Morandi (Mi-lan: edizioni del Milione, 1964).

8. C. l. ragghianti, “un’antologia di Morandi.” Critica d’arte 62 (May 1964): 11–21; on the relationship between ragghianti and contemporary art, see Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti e il carat-tere cinematografico della visione, ed. M. scotini (Milan: Charta, 2000).

9. radio interview with Morandi for voice of america, 25 april 1957, in vitali, Giorgio Morandi pittore, 86.

10. C. l. ragghianti, “introduzione,” Arte moderna in una raccolta italiana (Milan: edizioni del Milione, 1953), 15–7.

11. ragghianti, “Un’antologia di Morandi,” 13–4.

12. r. longhi, “Exit Morandi,” Paragone 175 (July 1964): 3–4; on the relationship between longhi and Morandi, see La col-lezione di Roberto Longhi. Dal Duecento a Caravaggio a Morandi, ed. M. gregori and g. romano (savigliano: l’artistica, 2007) and M. C. bandera, Morandi a Firenze. I suoi amici, critici e collezionisti (Milan: Mazzotta, 2005), 15–27.

13. letter from dina, anna, and Maria te-resa Morandi to roberto longhi, 2 July 1964, in bandera, Morandi a Firenze, 27.

14. r. longhi, “Momenti della pittura bolognese,” L’Archiginnasio 30 (1935): 1–3, 135.

15. r. longhi, “Morandi al ‘Fiore’,” opere complete di roberto longhi

14 (Florence: sansoni, 1984), 95–6. longhi quoted from Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu 3 (Paris: gallimard, 1954), 882: “la réalité à exprimer résidait, je le comprenais maintenant, non dans l’apparence du sujet, mais dans le degré de pénetration de cette impression à une profondeur où cette apparence importait peu, com-me le symbolisaient ce bruit de cuiller sur une assiette, cette raideur empesée de la serviette qui m’avaient été plus précieux pour mon renouvellement spirituel que tant des conversations humanitaires, patriotiques, internation-alistes.” the words “dans le degré de pénetration de cette impression” are a significant, and not previously noted, addition by longhi to Proust’s words.

16. longhi, “Exit Morandi,” 4.

17. J. abramowicz, Giorgio Morandi: The Art of Silence (new haven, london: yale university Press, 2004), 158–65; Secondo Morandi: Roma 1939: I premi

della Quadriennale, ed. C. Poppi with l. selleri (Ferrara: edisai, 2006).

18. F. arcangeli, “Morandi on guido reni of bologna,” Art News (February 1955): 30–2, 69.

19. this theme is developed from a different perspective in e. riccòmini, “Morandi: Memoria e presenza,” Morandi e il suo tempo, ed. F. solmi (Milan: Mazzotta, 1985), 11–9.

20. l. longanesi, “giorgio Morandi,” L’Italiano 3, 16–17 (december 1928).

21. on the relationship between Mo-randi and Il Selvaggio, see e. braun, “speaking volumes: giorgio Morandi’s still lifes and the Cultural Politics of strapaese,” in Modernism/Modernity 2, 3 (september 1995): 89–116; a. del Puppo, “Classico e italiano. immagini di Morandi nel decennio paesano,” Giorgio Morandi, ed. P.g. Castagnoli (turin: gal-leria Civica d’arte Moderna e Contempo-ranea / allemandi, 2000), 21–32.

22. a. soffici, “giorgio Morandi,” L’Italiano 7, 10 (March 1932): viii.

23. a. sandorfi, “acquisti pubblici e privati,” Quadriennale di Roma. Retrospettive 1931–1948 (rome: gal-leria nazionale d’arte Moderna/electa, 2005), 204; on the relationship between soffici and Morandi, see A Prato per vedere i Corot. Corrispondenza Moran-di-Soffici per un’antologica di Morandi, ed. l. Cavallo (Milan: Farsetti, 1989).

24. n. bertocchi, “alla Prima Quadrien-nale. gli emiliani,” L’Italia letteraria (15 February 1931).

25. C. brandi, “Cammino di Morandi,” Le Arti 1, 3 (February–March 1939): 245–55; and C. brandi, Morandi (Flor-ence: le Monnier, 1942).

26. vitali, Giorgio Morandi pittore,

Mor a ndi in the u nited states: exhiBitions, Ga lleries, MeMories

e l i s a b e t ta b a r i s o n i

4 2 4 3

In 1960, sophisticated American moviegoers

could see a 1941 Morandi still life (V. 305)

discussed in Federico Fellini’s La dolce vita

(page 42, fig. 20). Forty years later, the open-

ing pages of Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007)

invoke Morandi as the civilized human anti-

dote to the aftermath of September 11, 2001,

in New York.1 Detailing his protagonist’s re-

sponse to an exhibition of Morandi’s work,

DeLillo writes: “What she loved most were

the two still lifes on the north wall, by Gior-

gio Morandi, a painter her mother had studied

and written about. These were groupings of

bottles, jugs, biscuits tins, that was all, but

there was something in the brushstrokes that

held a mystery she could not name, or in the

irregular edge of vases and jars, some recon-

noiter inward, human and obscure, away from

the color of the paintings. Natura morta. The

Italian term for still life seemed stronger than

it had to be, somewhat ominous, even, but

these were matters she hadn’t talked about

with her mother.”

The stages by which Morandi’s name grew

in America were gradual, and they can be

traced in the history of his exhibitions there

and in critics’ responses to them.2

t h e g r o u n d B r e a k I n g 1 9 3 0 s :

the carnegie Prize, the cometa art gallery of

new York, and the golden gate International

exposition in san francisco

Morandi’s work was first exhibited in America

in 1929, when he competed for Pittsburgh’s

prestigious Carnegie Prize, as he did again in

1930, 1936, and 1939. His participation in the

Carnegie Prize competitions3 is often cited in

his letters to Italian friends and supporters,

among them Cesare Brandi,4 who was ac-

tive in promoting the export of Morandi’s art.

Correspondence between the two reveals the

extent of the artist’s network in the Italian art

world.5 Brandi, working in Bologna in a ministe-

rial position, met Morandi in 1933 and became

a passionate supporter, representing him at

important international events. In their corre-

spondence references to Morandi’s American

activity include a letter dated March 8, 1939, in

which the artist tells Brandi that he is preparing

two still lifes for Pittsburgh.6 Key to the growing

importance of Pittsburgh’s annual international

Giorgio Morandi applied for his first passport at the

age of sixty-eight. no globe-trotter, he never visited

america, unlike his work, which crossed the atlantic

in the late-1920s. By the 1950s, it was coveted by

discerning american collectors, including duncan

Phillips, and the attraction exerted by Morandi’s art

and persona had seeped beyond the world of museums

and art criticism and had begun to resonate quietly in

popular culture.

4 4 4 5

exhibition was Homer Saint-Gaudens, director

of the Carnegie Institute’s Department of Fine

Arts and organizer of the competition from

1922 to 1950.7 In 1927, Saint-Gaudens trav-

eled to Italy, where Mussolini expressed sup-

port for the spirit of the Pittsburgh competition.

Its Italian agent from 1922 to 1950 was one of

Morandi’s earliest collectors, the Venetian Ilario

Neri. Identified as “Secretario del Cerclo Artis-

tico” (Secretary of the Artistic Circle), Neri’s

name appears on the advisory board for Italy in

the Carnegie Prize archives up to 1957, and his

role, as yet little discussed, was certainly criti-

cal in promoting Morandi in Pittsburgh.8

During the 1930s, Morandi formed connec-

tions with the art scene around the Galleria La

Cometa, in Rome.9 The gallery’s director, Libe-

ro De Libero,10 rapidly became a supporter of

Morandi’s work and introduced him to Roman

collectors, including Contessa Mimi Pecci-

Blunt, the gallery’s owner. De Libero promoted

Morandi’s work in Rome and New York, in-

cluding three of his works in a 1937 exhibition

at the gallery’s American branch (Cometa Art

Gallery of New York, at 10 East 52nd Street).

Again, letters between Morandi and Brandi

supply important details. In a letter dated

November 21, 1938, Brandi mentions two of

Morandi’s works on display there in the Anthol-

ogy of Contemporary Italian Painting exhibition

of 1937, and their purchase by the countess.11

The Golden Gate International Exposition

in San Francisco provided an important show-

case for recent developments in Italian art.12

From February 19 through October 29, 1939,

the two steel and concrete hangars of the

fair’s Court of Honor were devoted to a dis-

play of international art. The choice of modern

Italian art was made by the Italian Ministry of

National Education. The high-ranking selection

committee included Brandi, ministry official

Antonino Santangelo, Roberto Longhi13 and

Giuseppe Bottai.14 On December 6, 1938,

Morandi was presented by Brandi with the

list of works that he and Longhi had selected

for the Italian display in San Francisco. The

exhibition included Italian old masters, but

as far as modern art was concerned, it was,

as Brandi put it, “highly selective.” The list

of forty-two works included pieces by artists

such as Scipione, Mario Mafai, Carlo Carrà,

Afro Basaldella, and Filippo de Pisis. Morandi

was represented by eight canvases.15 Atypi-

cal for its time, the selection was not of the

kind preferred by the Fascist regime, painters

of the old school and Novecento painters hav-

ing been excluded in favor of artists whose

color tended toward tonalism and realism.

t w e n t I e t h - c e n t u r Y I t a l I a n a r t

The immediate postwar period saw a sig-

nificant increase in interest in Italian modern

art. The trend was exemplified by Twentieth-

century Italian Art, an exhibition held at the

Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1949.

On view June 28–September 18, 1949, the

exhibition was a landmark in American appre-

ciation of Italian art and contributed to a wider

awareness of Morandi’s work, about which

American critics had continued to write dur-

ing the 1940s.16 It was long in the making.

Organizers Alfred Barr and James Thrall Soby

spent time in Italy visiting artists’ studios and

meeting collectors and critics. Morandi was

represented in two sections of the exhibition.

As a member of the Metaphysical school, he

was shown with Giorgio de Chirico and Car-

rà, and his work also appeared in the section

devoted to Italian art after the 1920s. Of his thir-

teen paintings, only one was from a collection

in the United States: the Still Life of 1916 (V.

27) from the Museum of Modern Art, as were

five Morandi etchings.17 The catalogue present-

ed Morandi as isolated in his Bolognese studio,

influenced by Paul Cézanne, in touch with re-

cent trends, and marginally part of the futurist

movement and the Metaphysical school.18 The

second part of the catalogue associated Mo-

randi with Piet Mondrian’s abstraction, in his

creative devotion to the subject and its lyrical

20

4 6 4 7

intensity. Soby noted that Morandi’s lyricism

cannot be conveyed in reproduction, thanks

to the artist’s soft outlines and use of color,

a point picked up by later American writers.

Only in the original do the paintings reveal

their qualities, dispelling any sense of monot-

ony brought on by reproductions.

The critical discourse on Morandi initiated

by the 1949 exhibition influenced the exhibi-

tions of the 1950s and American collectors.

Reviews included an article by Raffaele Carrieri

in the August issue of Harper’s Bazaar,19 with

others describing Morandi as the best living

Italian painter, an opinion also expressed by

Soby in the catalogue.20 The February 1955

issue of Art News, featuring a photograph

of the artist’s studio in Bologna, reflected a

growing interest in the artist. Two articles in

it proved key to his reputation in the United

States. John Berger’s (page 44, fig. 21), en-

titled “Morandi the Metaphysician of Bolo-

gna,”21 opened with an illustration of the Still

Life of 1939 (V. 239), exhibited in the 1949 ex-

hibition and reproduced in its catalogue,22 as

a significant example of the artist’s creative

devotion to seeking effective

three-dimensional solutions.

Berger’s caption related Mo-

randi’s painting to the delicate

light illuminating the Italian

landscape: “Giorgio Morandi’s

‘frayed, muted’ bottles stand

in warm brown space infused

with the same palpable light that

floods the Italian landscape.” As

Berger’s title indicated, Morandi

was still associated with Meta-

physical painting. However,

Berger identified some distinctive aspects of

his work, its peculiarly Italian qualities: “Only

in the Mediterranean and particularly in Italy

is one made visually aware of the gradual, im-

personal, open passing of time – the days fall-

ing like single grains of sand in an hourglass.”

Berger stressed the painter’s limited range of

subjects and referred to his “quiet, parochial

humility,” in keeping with an image of Morandi

as isolated.23 He interpreted Morandi’s meth-

od not so much as a return to order, but as

a rejection of the outside world, a monastic

retreat.24 Although isolation, spe-

cialization, and an excessive sense

of the artist’s individuality lay at the

root of a general crisis in Western

art, the true significance of Moran-

di’s art and solitude was different,

indicating an intellectual’s volun-

tary, dignified seclusion, in keep-

ing with the long cultural tradition

of humanism.

The second article (page 45,

fig. 22) published in the same is-

sue of Art News was written

by Bolognese art historian Francesco Ar-

cangeli, describing his visit with Morandi

to the Guido Reni exhibition in Bologna.

Significantly, this article was subtitled “The

Seventeenth-century Baroque Master’s Ret-

rospective Exhibition Is Discussed with Italy’s

Leading Modern Painter.”25

By this time Morandi was represented in

the collection of the Museum of Modern Art,

an indication of an artist’s quality and moder-

nity. Phillips’s association with the Museum

of Modern Art suggests a correspondence

between the curatorial choices made by Barr

and Soby and those of Phillips for his own mu-

seum.26 The provenances of the three works

in the collection of the Museum of Modern

Art are of interest in this connection. The Still

Life of 1916 (V. 27) was acquired through the

bequest of Lillie P. Bliss, who purchased it

at the 1948 Venice Biennale directly from the

artist’s collection; it was shown in the 1949

exhibition. The Still Life of 1938 (V. 225) en-

tered the Museum of Modern Art’s collection

in 1949, acquired from the Galleria d’Arte del

21 22

4 8 4 9

Cavallino in Venice, directed by Carlo Cardazzo.27

The third Morandi to enter the collection was

the Still Life of 1949 (V. 692). This painting

was acquired by Soby directly from the artist,

in Italy, a few months after the 1949 exhibi-

tion closed. In 1950 the work was ready to be

sent to Pittsburgh for the Carnegie Prize, and

Soby bequeathed it to the Museum of Modern

Art in 1979.28

t h e 1 9 5 0 s :

curt Valentin, the delius gallery and the

world house galleries

During the 1950s, Morandi’s presence in

America, marked by exhibitions and sales to

collectors, built gradually, but steadily. His

was by now among the most sought-after

Italian work on the New York art market. As

early as 1946, Alexander Jolas tried to obtain

two paintings by Morandi to show with work

by Picasso, Georges Braque, and Georges

Rouault at his Hugo Gallery.29 Morandi’s etch-

ings, acquired in 1947 by the Metropolitan

Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern

Art, were being promoted around this time by

painter Mario Bacchelli.30 Phillips acquired two

paintings by Morandi in the 1950s. His first pur-

chase, a 1953 still life (<#38> page XX), was

made from the Curt Valentin Gallery in 1954,

probably shortly before Valentin’s death.

Valentin’s importance in developing Ameri-

can interest in Morandi’s oeuvre in the United

States can be seen in the correspondence

between the Bolognese artist and the gal-

lery owner.31 A letter dated May 21, 1950,

indicates advanced plans for an exhibition

in New York. Morandi undertakes to find as

many paintings as possible held by Italian

collectors, including Pietro Rollino in Rome,

whom Valentin is planning to visit. Plans for

a retrospective at Valentin’s gallery are dis-

cussed again in a letter dated November 18,

1953. Morandi expresses doubt that it could

be ready by May 1954, since it would overlap

with an exhibition in The Hague being orga-

nized by Vitale Bloch for April 1954.32 In a letter

dated July 26, 1953, Morandi writes of Gino

Ghiringhelli33 as intermediary for the shipping

of the works to Valentin and, as noted by Fla-

vio Fergonzi,34 refers in a postscript to a still

life near completion, with the dimensions of

Morandi’s studio, Bologna

5 0 5 1

the painting now in The Phillips Collection.

In a letter to Valentin on April 8, 1954, Mo-

randi confirms the date of the exhibition in The

Hague and informs him that the exhibition in-

cludes no paintings owned by him or by the Gal-

leria del Milione. Plans for a retrospective may

still have been in the works when Valentin died

suddenly of a heart attack in August 1954.

A sign of the increased interest in his work,

Morandi’s first solo exhibitions in the United

States were held in New York at the Delius

Gallery, in 1955, and at the World House

Galleries in 1957 and 1960. The Delius Gal-

lery, directed by Delius Giese,35 at 470 Park

Avenue at 58th Street, held a small show

of eleven paintings and some drawings and

prints, from October 5 to November 5, 1955.

Among the paintings were two works owned

by the Museum of Modern Art, still lifes of

1916 and 1938. The others came from private

American collections. The catalogue present-

ed Morandi as a solitary artist in an ivory tow-

er “The delicate and precise creations of this

humble recluse of Bologna have long been

considered among the best in twentieth-cen-

tury Italian art. Almost of legendary stature in

his native country as an ‘ivory tower’ of pur-

ist strength, of Latin lucidity and lyric grace,

Giorgio Morandi is a dedicated, monastic artist

who has never joined in the verbal battles and

experimental sprees of his articulate contem-

poraries.” It also credited him with a purist ap-

proach to art, specifically Italian art, and noted

his special lyricism.36

In the meantime, a rapid series of events

promoted the “rediscovery” of modern Ital-

ian art in the wake of the pioneering 1949

exhibition. Contemporary Italian Art: Paint-

ing, Drawing, Sculpture, an exhibition at the

Saint Louis City Art Museum held October

13–November 14, 1955, presented eight oils

and three drawings by Morandi, alongside

the works of the most advanced exponents

of Italian abstract art and art informel: Afro

Basaldella, Renato Birolli, Alberto Burri, Ennio

Morlotti, Emilio Vedova, Guiseppe Capogrossi,

Pietro Consagra, together with Giacomo Man-

zù, Renato Guttuso, Marino Marini, and others.

Significantly, the Morandis in the exhibition

came from American collections. As recently

noted by Lorenza Selleri,37 the growing interest

on the part of galleries during the 1950s stimu-

lated an increase in the number of Morandi’s

American collectors, including Theo Haimann

and William Adair Bernoudy in Saint Louis,

Ralph Colin, Kurt Berger, Harold Franklin, Don-

ald B. Straus, Franck Pappa, and Herman Gold-

smith in New York, as well as others in Boston,

Los Angeles, Albany, and Washington.38

In 1956, Morandi was included in an exhi-

bition at the Newark Museum, New Jersey,

entitled XXth-century Italian Art: An Exhibition.

This was followed in 1957 by An Exhibition of

Painting in Postwar Italy 1945–1957 at the Ital-

ian House of Columbia University, New York,

curated by a high ranking committee that in-

cluded Lionello Venturi,39 Palma Bucarelli,40

and Meyer Shapiro.41 In his introduction to the

catalogue, Venturi stressed aspects of Moran-

di that subsequently proved important in the

debate about American abstract art: “He calls

attention to form, color and space, as though

he were an abstract painter. But he is not an

abstract painter since his taste is traditional.”

The attention shown to Morandi by the

Hugo, Valentin, and Delius galleries in New

York was fundamental to a deeper discussion

of his art and culminated in two solo exhibi-

tions at the World House Galleries in 1957

and 1960.42 Giorgio Morandi Retrospective,

held November 5–December 7, 1957, in the

galleries on Madison Avenue at 77th Street,

New York, was the most wide-ranging of Mo-

randi’s solo shows in the United States in the

1950s. The exhibition presented a total of 60

works: thirty-five oil paintings, thirteen etch-

ings, two watercolors and ten drawings.42

Venturi’s introduction to the catalogue was of

major importance to Morandi’s reputation in

the United States. On his lack of fame outside

Italy, Venturi wrote: “It is difficult to classify

him within one of the trends which dominate

the artistic scene of the world.” His work

needed to be displayed and interpreted on its

own terms, because this artist, “who seemed

to be the most provincial of all was in fact one

of the most international among the Italian art-

ists.” In 1957, Morandi won first prize for paint-

ing at the São Paulo Biennale in Brazil; he had

already won first prize for prints in 1953.

5 2 5 3

Venturi attributed Morandi’s limited subject

matter to a desire to concentrate on form, line,

and color, in accordance with a strong attach-

ment to tradition. “Abstract art always implies

a severance from tradition, and Morandi is a

traditional man. His way of life is thoroughly

traditional.” Venturi’s second consideration,

which found a ready echo in American writ-

ing, was the silent classicism of Morandi’s

intellectual position between the two wars:

“Between the two wars, when Italy made a

great clamor over its classic tradition and its

monumental power, painting small bottles

assumed an unsurpassed irony which was a

warning against illusions, and advice to follow

a better road.”

Venturi’s text provided some new insights

for an analysis of Morandi’s landscapes, an

aspect of his work overlooked by American

critics, stressing a monumentality in it akin to

that of the still lifes. He ended by reflecting on

the relationship between Morandi and abstract

art. Morandi’s abstraction was almost innate

and involuntary, firmly a part of tradition, as al-

ready stressed, and yet modern: “It is perhaps

worthwhile to emphasize that Morandi, by de-

valuating his subject matter, is much more of

an abstractionist than he believes himself to

be, and therefore he belongs to the art of to-

day much more than people believe.”

The New York press responded favorably

to the exhibition. An article in Art News in

November 1957 presented Morandi as a pure

painter, almost a protagonist of an artistic re-

naissance and an interpreter of the artist’s

true role: “Art is not life, is not religion, nor

the artist, but that it has had and still has its

own place; and Morandi’s respect for art is all

the deeper since he knows its limitations.”44

The Saturday Review published an article

by Soby on Morandi.45 Discussing the exhibi-

tion he had organized with Barr in 1949, Soby

recalled their views in 1948. At the time, they

had felt that Italian critics were too enthusias-

tic about the work of Morandi, whose produc-

tion seemed repetitive, provincial, and less

important than that of internationally known

figures such as Amedeo Modigliani, Umberto

Boccioni and Giorgio de Chirico. But Morandi,

once discovered, continued Soby, allowed

Morandi’s studio, Bologna

5 4 5 5

for no half measures: either one did not

understand him or one loved him. This com-

ment was confirmed by the reaction of the

public at the World House Galleries, as Soby

noted: “There seemed to be no middle ground

of appreciation. I doubt that with Morandi’s

art there ever will be.”

The first World House Galleries exhibition

traveled to the Phillips Gallery in Washington,

D.C., and was on display there December 15,

1957–January 8, 1958. From it, Phillips bought

the 1950 Still Life (<#31> page XX).46 His role

was significant, not only because he bought a

second Morandi, but also because of his will-

ingness to host a solo exhibition of the artist.

Noted as the first American museum of mod-

ern art, the Phillips Gallery often collaborated

with private galleries, especially in the case

of contemporary artists. The exhibition at the

World House Galleries gave Phillips the chance

to present an artist he loved, whose work was

already in his collection. For his second Moran-

di, Phillips paid more than seven times the price

of his first one, a mere three years later, a mea-

sure of Morandi’s new place in the market.

An article by Leslie Judd Portner in the

Washington Post and Times Herald on Decem-

ber 22, 1957, entitled Dynamic Knaths, Poetic

Morandi noted that the artist’s fortune had

grown internationally only since the war and

found that Morandi’s uniqueness derived from

the poetry with which he infused the objects

he depicted: “What gives Morandi his interna-

tional reputation is the feeling that he is able to

inject into his paintings. Absolutely quiet and

reposeful they nevertheless have a magic and

lyrical quality which grows on you the longer

you look at them. In their absence of motion,

dynamics or vibrancy, they have a classical re-

pose and balance which is poetically satisfy-

ing, despite the limitation of subject.”

A second solo show of Morandi orga-

nized by the World House Galleries included

seventy-nine works – oils, watercolors, draw-

ings and prints – and was held December 6,

1960–January 14, 1961. Art News devoted a

major article to it, with two reproductions from

the catalogue.47 “The Lonely Intellectual” was

the title the Nation gave to its article on the

exhibition in its January 21, 1961, issue.

a f t e r t h e 1 9 5 0 s : Personal encounters

Among the exhibitions dedicated to Morandi

after the 1950s, the 1967 show at the Albert

Loeb and Krugier Gallery was particularly

important. On display in the gallery’s rooms

in New York were thirty-seven oils, twelve

watercolors and nine prints. The catalogue

included a memoir by art historian and crit-

ic John Rewald dated February 1967, three

years after Morandi’s death. In what has sub-

sequently become a classic in the literature

on Morandi, Rewald recalled his first visit to

Morandi’s studio on March 25, 1964, describ-

ing his experience of its mystery with intense

feeling: “…an ordinary room of a middle-

class apartment lit by two ordinary windows.

But the rest was extraordinary: on the floor,

on shelves, on a table, everywhere, boxes,

bottles, vases, all kinds of containers in all

kinds of shapes. They cluttered any available

space, except for the two simple easels.”48

He continued: “They must have been there

for a long time; on the surfaces of the shelves

or tables, as well as on the flat tops of boxes,

cans or similar receptacles, there was a thick

layer of dust. It was a dense, gray, velvety

dust…not the result of negligence and untidi-

ness but of patience, a witness to complete

peace.” When he asked Morandi if he would

take the bottles to his summer residence, the

artist replied, smiling. “’I have other bottles

there,’” he said, ‘no need to disturb these.”’

Rewald repeated the legend of Morandi the

monk, isolated and immobile in a place where

the signs of the passage of time are a mark of

nobility and resistance, or better, persistence

of memory and passion for the object. His

text is less important from an art-historical

perspective than for its interest as a personal

memory, rich in the magical atmosphere of

the studio of one of the last great masters.

Its impact on the reputation and perception of

Morandi in the United States is evident in the

comparison of two articles by American artist

and critic Sidney Tillim.

Tillim wrote a long review of the second

exhibition at the World House Galleries that

appeared in Arts Magazine in December

1960.49 In it, he defined Morandi as “one of

5 6 5 7

received major reviews. Among these was a

long article in the March 1983 issue of Art in

America by Janet Abramovicz, who had been

Morandi’s student and assistant at the Acca-

demia di Bologna in the 1950s.52

Illustrating her article with interesting pho-

tographs of the artist’s studio, Abramovicz

rejected the view of Morandi as isolated and

solitary, a classicist within an academic tradi-

tion, “an academic provincial, a recluse living

in an ivory tower.” Instead, she stressed his

difficult position during the Fascist period, his

break with the academic world, his knowledge

of French art through the Venice Biennale, and

his interest in Georges Seurat, Giotto, Piero

della Francesca, Paul Cézanne, and Henri Rous-

seau. Although written from a critic’s point of

view, Abramovicz’s text assumes greater value

thanks to her memories of Morandi the man.

Although Morandi’s exhibition history reflects

a movement from Italy to the United States,

traffic also flowed in the opposite direction.

Abramovicz, Rewald, Soby, and Tillim traveled

to Italy and visited Morandi. Their memories of

the man who seemed to personify the artist’s

highest expression of simplicity, rigor, and in-

exhaustible scruting, accompanied by photo-

graphs of the studio, mantled in a thin layer of

dust that seemed to endow the objects with

nobility, were just as important as the exhibi-

tions and retrospectives in fostering admiration

for Morandi’s work in the United States.

The appeal of Morandi’s art seems to

spring from the essential intimacy of his life

and study and leads constantly to the soli-

tary, silent reflection at the root of poetry.

“Aspirants to the role of painter-as-poet are

many. Giorgio Morandi was the real thing,”

wrote critic Holland Cotter53 or, as Abramovicz

wrote, quoting Proust at the end of her ar-

ticle: “Proust could have been describing Mo-

randi when he wrote, ‘This work of the artist

is to seek, to discern something different un-

derneath the material…for art will undo and

make us retrace our steps and return to the

depths of ourselves, where what really ex-

isted lies unknown to us.’”54 Duncan Philips

would have agreed, as he looked at the two

pale yet powerful still lifes hanging in the gal-

leries of his museum in Washington.

the few great living masters of modern art.”

Tillim, well-informed on the critical discourse

on Morandi in the United States, cited Ven-

turi’s introduction to the 1957 catalogue. Like

Venturi, Tillim included Morandi’s work in the

discussion of figurative versus abstract art.

Whereas in 1957 Venturi could affirm that

the “task of the bottles in Morandi’s paint-

ings is to assure him that tradition is safe,”

Tillim was now able to add that Morandi’s

bottles also had the task of restoring “nobil-

ity to subject matter, to enable the painter ‘to

concentrate on the values of form.’” In this

way, wrote Tillim, the bottles “symbolize the

potential re-humanization of art.”

In 1967, Tillim again reviewed Morandi’s

work, this time in connection with the exhi-

bition at the Loeb and Krugier Gallery, in Art

Forum.50 This time, Tillim mentioned Rewald’s

vivid memories of meeting the artist and add-

ed one of his own, more ironic and less poetic

than Rewald’s, illustrating the text with photo-

graphs taken during a visit to Morandi at his

Grizzana studio in the summer of 1960. The

accounts of Rewald and Tillim, their freedom

in “narrating” the artist, marked a new and

more intimate approach to Morandi and a fa-

miliarity with his work on the part of American

critics and public. It was no longer necessary

to place him within the context of modern

Italian art, because his oeuvre had by now

been absorbed by the public. Tillim’s article

opened the way for future American com-

mentators to follow parallel lines of investiga-

tion. On the one hand, with the artist and his

work well known, it was interesting to look at

it in relation to the contemporary scene, and

to establish parallels between Morandi and

the aesthetic debate on American abstract

art. On the other hand, having ascertained his

stature within the Italian modern art scene,

Morandi the man could now emerge, a great

master, symbol of the true artist, enveloped

in the magical and dignified solitude of his

Bolognese studio, bearer of a hermetic and

alienating yet poetic message.

In the 1980s, Morandi’s reputation in

America received a boost with the 1981 exhi-

bition, shown at the Des Moines Art Center,

as well as in San Francisco and New York.51 It

5 8 5 9

1. d. delillo, Falling Man (london: Pica-dor, 2007), 12 (u. s. edition, new york: scribner, 2007); the exhibition referred to by delillo was Giorgio Morandi: Paintings 1950–1964, new york, lucas schoormans gallery, september 24–de-cember 4, 2004.

2. For more on Morandi in the united states, see Giorgio Morandi 1890–1964 (new york: Metropolitan Museum of art / Milan: skira, 2008), especially l. selleri, “Morandi on either side of the atlantic: Critics, Collectors and dealers,” 174–85; For the period 1950–64 see also Morandi ultimo. Nature morte 1950–1964, ed. l. Mattioli rossi (Milan: Mazzotta, 1997), especially the text by J. J. rishel and the catalogue of works by F. Fergonzi.

3. the Carnegie Prize was established in 1896 by Pittsburgh industrialist andrew Carnegie. the annual competition for the prize was known as the Carnegie in-ternational exhibition, which showcased international art. during and after World War ii, from 1940–49, it was limited to american art, becoming international again in 1950.

4. Cesare brandi (1906–1988) was a critic, aesthetician, historian of italian art, expert on restoration, and belle-lettrist. he held important posts in the state administration of antiquities and fine arts. he was co-founder, with giulio Carlo argan, of the istituto Centrale del restauro (Central institute for restora-tion), which he directed from its incep-tion in 1941 to 1959. From 1960 onward, he taught at the universities of Palermo and rome.

5. Carteggio Brandi-Morandi 1938–1963, ed. M. Pasquali (rome: editori riuniti, 1990).

6. Morandi participated in four Carnegie international exhibitions before World War ii, and after the war he competed in three. generally, the awards to italian artists in the pre-war competitions were for figurative, occasionally traditional, and colorist work. in the exhibitions in which Morandi participated, the first prize went to Felice Carena in 1929; the third honorable mention went to giuseppe Montanari in 1930 and alberto salietti in 1936; and the italian-born american painter luigi lucioni received the aethel Waters Popular Prize in 1939.

7. see v. a. Clark, International Encoun-ters: The Carnegie International and Contemporary Art, 1896–1996 (Pitts-burgh: Carnegie Museum of art, 1996), especially pages 73–91 for the saint-gaudens years.

8. letter from homer saint-gaudens to edward duff balken, 12 december 1922, Pittsburgh institute archives.

9. Giorgio Morandi nelle raccolte romane, ed. M. Pasquali (rome: studio d’arte Campaiola, 2003).

10. libero de libero (1906–1981), a poet and writer, was part of the roman art scene. Close to artists scipione and Mafai, he was a mainstay of galleria la Cometa.

11. see letter from libero de libero to Morandi, 25 november 1938, in Giorgio Morandi nelle raccolte romane, 45–6: “dear Morandi, your pictures have returned from america. because the contessa has herself bought the two still lifes for her collection…”

12. see a. sciarrone, “golden gate exhibition di san Francisco 1939: una mostra dimenticata,” Arte in Friuli, Arte a Trieste 24 (2005): 83–94. Celebrating the recent completion of the golden

gate bridge and the san Francisco–oakland bay bridge, the exhibition pro-moted unity among Pacific rim nations. it presented the latest in architecture, design, and the visual arts and provided one of the last occasions for internation-al exchange before World War ii.

13. roberto longhi (1890–1970), a key figure in italian art history, taught me-dieval and modern art at the university of bologna and later at the university of Florence. he met Morandi in 1934. For longhi’s contributions to Morandi criti-cism, see F. Fergonzi, “giorgio Morandi: Criticism, Cities, sources, series” in this publication.

14. giuseppe bottai (1895–1959) was an italian politician and mayor of rome, then minister for national education dur-ing the Fascist regime.

15. the exhibition catalogue lists works by: afro basaldella (one), Carlo Carrà (ten), giorgio de Chirico (three), Filippo de Pisis (two), renato guttuso (one), Mario Mafai (one), scipione (gino bonichi) (four), ardengo soffici (two), armando spadini (one), and arturo tosi (five); sculptures by giacomo Manzù (four), Marino Marini (one), arturo Mar-tini (one), and Mirko basaldella (one); as well as drawings and prints by Carrà, umberto boccioni, leo longanesi, Mino Maccari, Manzù, Mirko basaldella, Morandi, scipione, Mario sironi, and others. Morandi’s paintings were: v. 16, v. 219, v. 12, v. 52, v. 240, v. 35, v. 222, v. 101.

16. the exhibition was curated by James thrall soby and alfred hamilton barr; see s. Meltzoff, “italy: report on recent Painting” Magazine of Art (February 1946) and M. bacchelli, “giorgio Mo-randi” Magazine of art (october 1947).

f o o t n o t e s

Table in Morandi’s Grizzana studio

6 16 0

17. see F. Fergonzi, La collezione Mattioli. Capolavori dell’avanguardia italiana (Milan: skira, 2003).

18. “Morandi’s activity in the scuola metafisica was peripheral, being car-ried on in the isolation of his studio at bologna.” J. t. soby, “the scuola Metafisica,” Twentieth-Century Italian Art (new york: Museum of Modern art, 1949), 23.

19. r. Carrieri, “Morandi of bologna,” Harper’s Bazaar (august 1949): 97, 175.

20. “the third member of the scuola, giorgio Morandi, is today almost uni-versally considered by the italians to be their finest living painter.” soby, “Paint-ing and sculpture since 1920: later Work of de Chirico, Carrà and Morandi,” Twentieth-Century Italian Art, 26.

21. J. berger, “Morandi the Metaphysi-cian of bologna,” Art News (February 1955): 28–9, 66–7.

22. “Consider, for example, the tiny bottle at the right of his 1939 still life… . its presence is the clue to the entire composition, and was probably arrived at after endless experiment and revi-sion.” soby, “Painting and sculpture since 1920,” Twentieth-Century Italian Art, 26.

23. “and in an age in which a preten-tious internationalism of style encour-ages every artist to feel that he is a potential World Figure, such quiet, parochial humility as Morandi’s is rare and dignified.” berger, “Morandi the Metaphysician of bologna,” 29, 28–30, 66–7.

24. berger, “Morandi the Metaphysician of bologna,” 29, 67.

25. Francesco arcangeli (1915–1974), italian art historian and critic, was ro-berto longhi’s pupil and his assistant at the university of bologna from the end of World War ii to 1948. From 1958–68, he was director of the galleria d’arte Moderna di bologna. in 1967 he became a lecturer at the university of bologna. he studied Morandi’s activity post-1942 and wrote a monograph about him in 1964, a text eventually rejected by the artist. For the role of arcangeli in Mo-randi criticism, see Fergonzi, “giorgio Morandi: Criticism, Cities, sources, se-ries”; F. arcangeli, “Morandi on guido reni of bologna,” Art News (February 1955), 30–2, 99.

26. Phillips was elected to the board of trustees of the Museum of Modern art on october 25, 1929. he served until october 1935, when he became an hon-orary life trustee.

27. Carlo Cardazzo was an italian editor and owner of two historic italian galler-ies, the galleria del naviglio in Milan and the galleria Cavallino in venice.

28. see letter from soby to homer saint-gaudens, 6 december 1949, in the archives Morandi, Comune di grizzana, bologna.

29. alexander Jolas’s hugo gallery pro-moted american art, particularly pop art; a letter from brandi to Morandi, 26 sep-tember 1946, reads: “a young greek-american will come to visit you with a letter of presentation from me, called Jolas; he is the director of a high-ranking art gallery in new york (called hugo). Jolas is planning an exhibition for the beginning of the season with paintings by Picasso, braque, rouault etc., and he would like at least two paintings by you.” see also brandi’s letters of 2 october 1946 and 20 october 1946, with

references to Jolas’s agent in italy, liana Ferri, who had been asked by Jolas to meet the artist and acquire works for the hugo gallery.

30. see selleri, “Morandi on either side of the atlantic,” 182, note 55. selleri quotes an unpublished letter from Mario bacchelli in new york to Morandi, 9 February 1947, regarding the prices paid by the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern art for the artist’s etchings.

31. Curt valentin (1902–1954) worked at the buchholz gallery, hamburg, from 1934 until he emigrated to the united states in 1937 with a sizeable number of modern german works. he opened a gallery on West 46th street and later moved to West 57th street. after 1951, this became the Curt valentin gallery. noted for his interest in modern art, val-entin was one of new york’s most active gallery owners, organizing exhibitions and publishing important small editions of poetry and literature illustrated by contemporary artists; Curt valentin papers, archives of the Museum of Modern art, new york.

32. Giorgio Morandi, the hague, ge-meentemuseum, april 14–June 6, 1954, then london, new burlington galleries, June 25–July 24, 1954.

33. gino (virginio) ghiringhelli (1898–1964) was a painter and teacher at the accademia di brera. From 1938 onward he concentrated almost exclusively on the galleria del Milione, which he founded with his brothers in 1930.

34. Fergonzi, “giorgio Morandi: Criti-cism, Cities, sources, series.”

35. upon Curt valentin’s death, some of the Morandi works in his possession passed to the delius gallery, directed by delius giese.

36. “though a purist, his canvases are far from being anemic. theirs is the miracle to invest deceptively simple stylizations with poetry and substance.” l. deuel, Giorgio Morandi (new york: delius gallery, 1955).

37. selleri, “Morandi on either side of the atlantic,” 183.

38. the presence of Morandi in ameri-can collections grew significantly in those years; a clear sign of the impor-tance of the u.s. market for italian art is the exhibition held at Palazzo reale in Milan april 30–June 26, 1960 (which then traveled to rome, galleria nazion-ale d’arte Moderna, July 16–september 18, 1960), Arte italiana del XX secolo da collezioni americane (italian art of 20th Century from american Collections). the exhibition presented nine paintings by Morandi and a catalogue with an introduction by J. t . soby.

39. lionello venturi (1885–1961), a celebrated italian critic and art histo-rian, lectured at the university of turin beginning in 1915. he was obliged to abandon teaching under the Fascist regime, and he moved to France and then to the united states in 1939. based in new york, he was a professor at John hopkins unversity and the universidad nacional autónoma de México, and he lectured at the École libre des hautes Études in new york and in many other u. s. cities. he returned to italy after the war and became a professor at the uni-versity of rome. Concerning venturi’s role in Morandi criticism, see Fergonzi, “giorgio Morandi: Criticism, Cities, sources, series.”

40. Palma bucarelli (1910–1998) was an italian critic and art historian associ-ated with the galleria nazionale d’arte Moderna in rome, which she directed from 1942–75.

41. art historian Meyer schapiro (1904–1996) taught at Columbia university beginning in 1928.

42. the World house galleries, founded by herbert Mayer in 1953 and in operation until 1968, were dedicated to the promotion of international art. For european art they concentrated on France, greece, spain, austria, sweden, and italy.

43. among the works illustrated in this publication, the following were shown in the exhibitions at the World house galleries: the 1935 still life (v. 193) was listed as no. 3 in the 1957 exhibition and no. 2 in the 1960 exhibition; the 1941 Still Life (v. 306, <#19> p. xx in this publication) was no. 20 in the 1957 exhibition and no. 21 in the 1960 exhibi-tion; the 1950 Still Life (<#31>, p. xx in this publication) was no. 28 in the 1957 exhibition.

44. Fairfield Porter, “giorgio Morandi: World house galleries,” Art News (no-vember 1957): 12.

45. J. t. soby, “giorgio Morandi,” Sat-urday Review (January 1958): 23–4.

46. the still life acquired by Phillips seems to be number 18 in the catalogue of the World house galleries, dated 1949–50 and measuring 15 x 17 in.

47. Art News (december 1960): 38–9, 59–60.

48. John rewald (1912–1994), renowned art scholar of german origin, emigrated to the united states in 1941 and is the author of fundamental studies on mod-

ern european art and impressionism. he was a professor at the university of Chi-cago and at the City university of new york; J. rewald, “visit with Morandi,” Morandi (new york: albert loeb and Krugier gallery, 1967).

49. sidney tillim (1925–2001) was an american realist painter and art critic; s. tillim, “Month in review,” Arts (decem-ber 1960): 44–5.

50. s. tillim, “Morandi: a Critical note and a Memoir,” Artforum (september 1967): 42–6. tillim notes the interest-ing growth in the market for Morandi, already evident in the two purchases by duncan Phillips. he writes: “in 1964, i could have purchased one of his prints in new york for $250. the starting price for a print at loeb-Krugier last May was around $1,200.”

51. Giorgio Morandi (curated by the des Moines art Center), san Francisco Museum of Modern art, september 24–november 1, 1981; new york, the guggenheim Museum, november 19, 1981–January 17, 1982; des Moines art Center, February 1–March 14, 1982.

52. J. abramovicz, “the liberation of the object,” Art in America (March 1983): 138–46.

53. h. Cotter, “all that life Contains,” New York Times (september 18, 2008).

54. J. abramovicz, “the liberation of the object,” 146, from Marcel Proust, The Past Recaptured, trans. andreas Mayor (new york: random house, 1971).

works

6 4 6 5s t i l l l i F e , 1 9 1 4F l o W e r s , c . 1 9 1 3

6 6 6 7s t i l l l i F e , 1 9 2 1s t i l l l i F e , 1 9 1 9

6 8 6 9s t i l l l i F e , 1 9 2 3 s t i l l l i F e , c . 1 9 2 3

7 0 7 1s e l F - P o r t r a i t, 1 9 2 4 F l o W e r s , 1 9 2 8

7 2 7 3l a n d s C a P e , 1 9 2 8 s t i l l l i F e , 1 9 2 8

7 4 7 5s t i l l l i F e W i t h C o F F e e P o t s a n d y e l l o W C l o t h , 1 9 2 9 s t i l l l i F e , 1 9 3 0

7 6 7 7s t i l l l i F e , 1 9 3 1 s t i l l l i F e , 1 9 3 6

7 8 7 9s t i l l l i F e , 1 9 3 6 s t i l l l i F e , 1 9 3 9

8 0 8 1l a n d s C a P e , 1 9 4 1 s t i l l l i F e , 1 9 4 1

8 2 8 3t h e W h i t e r o a d , 1 9 4 1 F l o W e r s , 1 9 4 2

8 4 8 5s t i l l l i F e , 1 9 4 3 s t i l l l i F e , 1 9 4 3

8 6 8 7s t i l l l i F e , 1 9 4 6 W h i t e s t i l l l i F e , 1 9 4 6

8 8 8 9s t i l l l i F e , 1 9 4 7 s t i l l l i F e , 1 9 4 8

9 0 9 1s t i l l l i F e , 1 9 4 8 – 4 9 s t i l l l i F e , 1 9 4 9

9 2 9 3s t i l l l i F e , c . 1 9 4 9 s t i l l l i F e , 1 9 5 0

9 4 9 5s t i l l l i F e , 1 9 5 0 s t i l l l i F e , 1 9 5 1

9 6 9 7s t i l l l i F e , c . 1 9 5 1 F l o W e r s , 1 9 5 2

9 8 9 9s t i l l l i F e , 1 9 5 2 s t i l l l i F e , 1 9 5 2

1 0 0 1 0 1s t i l l l i F e , 1 9 5 3 s t i l l l i F e , 1 9 5 3

1 0 2 1 0 3s t i l l l i F e , 1 9 5 3 – 5 4 s t i l l l i F e , 1 9 5 3 – 5 4

1 0 4 1 0 5s t i l l l i F e , 1 9 5 4 s t i l l l i F e , 1 9 5 4

1 0 6 1 0 7s t i l l l i F e , 1 9 5 5 s t i l l l i F e , 1 9 5 6

1 0 8 1 0 9s t i l l l i F e , 1 9 5 6 C o u r t ya r d o n v i a F o n d a z z o , 1 9 5 7

1 1 0 1 1 1s t i l l l i F e , 1 9 5 9 s t i l l l i F e , 1 9 5 9

1 1 2 1 1 3s t i l l l i F e , 1 9 6 0 s t i l l l i F e , 1 9 6 2

1 1 5

Dimensions in inches have, in some cases, been converted from centimeters and may not be exact. Numbers with the prefix V. are those assigned to the works in Lamberto Vitali’s catalogue raisonné of Morandi’s paintings, Morandi. Catalogo gener-ale (Milan: Electa, 1977).

works BY gIorgIo MorandI

flowers (Fiori), c. 1913 Oil on canvas 64.5 x 49.5 cm 25 3/8 x 19 1/2 in. Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, L. F. Collection V. 14 Page 62

still life (Natura morta), 1914 Oil on canvas 73 x 64.5 cm 28 3/4 x 25 3/8 in. Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Giovanardi Collection V. 13 Page 63

still life (Natura morta), 1916 Oil on canvas 60 x 54 cm 23 5/8 x 21 5/16 in. Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Mattioli Collection, Venice V. 28 Page 28

still life (Natura morta), 1916 Oil on canvas 65.5 x 55.5 cm 25 13/16 x 21 7/8 in. Private collection V. 29 Page 28

still life (Natura morta), 1918 Oil on canvas 65 x 55 cm 25 5/8 x 21 5/8 in. Civiche Raccolte d’Arte, Riccardo and Magda Jucker Collection, Milan V. 38 Page 24

still life (Natura morta), 1919 Oil on canvas 45 x 59 cm 17 3/4 x 23 1/4 in. Private collection V. 48 Page 64

still life (Natura morta), 1921 Oil on canvas 45 x 53 cm 17 3/4 x 20 7/8 in. Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto V. 65 Page xx

still life (Natura morta), 1923 Oil on canvas 50 x 60 cm 19 11/16 x 23 5/8 Private collection V. 82 Page xx

still life (Natura morta), 1923 60 x 60 cm 23 5/8 x 23 5/8 in. Civici Musei, Alberto Della Ragione Collection, Florence V. 114 Page xx

still life (Natura morta), c. 1923 Oil on canvas 43 x 46 cm 17 x 18 1/8 in. Private collection V. 80 Page xx

self-portrait (Autoritratto), 1924 Oil on canvas 47 x 42 cm 18 1/2 x 16 1/2 in. Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, L. F. Collection V. 96 Page xx

flowers (Fiori), 1928 Oil on canvas 36 x 46 cm 14 3/16 x 18 1/8 in. Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, L. F. Collection V. 126 Page xx

landscape (Paesaggio),1928 Oil on canvas 61.5 x 47 cm 24 1/4 x 18 1/2 in. Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Giovanardi Collection V. 135 Page xx

still life (Natura morta), 1928 Oil on canvas 34.5 x 46.5 cm 13 5/8 x 18 5/16 in. Museo d’Arte Moderna

l I s t o f I l l u s t r at I o n s

1 1 6 1 1 7

e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Giovanardi Collection V. 128 Page xx

still life (Natura morta), 1929 Oil on canvas 55 x 57 cm 21 5/8 x 22 7/16 in. Pinacoteca di Brera, Emilio e Maria Jesi Collection, Milan V. 143 Page xx

still life with coffee Pots and Yellow cloth (Natura morta), 1929 Oil on canvas 51 x 47 cm 20 1/16 x 18 1/2 in. Private collection V. 137 Page xx

still life (Natura morta), 1930 Oil on canvas 47 x 51.5 cm 18 1/2 x 20 5/16 in. Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Giovanardi Collection V. 155 Page xx

still life (Natura morta), 1931 Oil on canvas 36 x 56 cm 14 3/16 x 22 1/16 in. Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Giovanardi Collection V. 165 Page xx

still life (Natura morta), 1936 Oil on canvas 51 x 62.5 cm 20 1/16 x 24 5/8 in. Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Giovanardi Collection V. 208 Page xx

still life (Natura morta), 1936 Oil on canvas 50.5 x 60.2 cm 19 7/8 x 23 3/4 in. Private collection V. 207 Page xx

still life (Natura morta), 1939 (detail) Oil on canvas 28 x 35 cm 11 x 13 3/4 in.

Private collection V. 245 Page xx

still life (Natura morta), 1939 Oil on canvas 32 x 56.5 cm 12 5/8 x 22 1/4 in. Private collection V. 246 Page xx

landscape (Paesaggio), 1940 Oil on canvas 35 x 52 cm 13 3/4 x 20 1/2 in. Private collection V. 270 Page xx

landscape (Paesaggio), 1941 Oil on canvas 37 x 40 cm 14 5/8 x 15 3/4 in. Civiche Raccolte d’Arte, Casa-Museo Boschi Di Stefano, Milan V. 332 Page xx

landscape (Paesaggio),1941 Oil on canvas 39 x 48 cm 15 3/8 x 18 15/16 in.

Pinacoteca di Brera, Lamberto Vitali Collection, Milan V. 343 Page xx

landscape (Paesaggio),1941 Oil on canvas 33 x 52.5 cm 13 x 20 5/8 in. Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, L. F. Collection V. 333 Page xx

still life (Natura morta), 1941 Oil on canvas 34.5 x 44.2 cm 13 5/8 x 17 3/8 in. Private collection V. 306 Page xx

the white road (La strada bianca), 1941 Oil on canvas 42 x 52.5 cm 16 1/2 x 20 5/8 in. Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Giovanardi Collection V. 341 Page xx

flowers (Fiori), 1942 Oil on canvas 24 x 29.5 cm 9 3/8 x 11 5/8 in. Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Giovanardi Collection V. 349 Page xx

still life (Natura morta), 1943 Oil on canvas 36 x 44.5 cm 14 3/16 x 17 1/2 in. Private collection V. 418 Page xx

still life (Natura morta), 1943 Oil on canvas 22.8 x 35.3 cm 9 x 14 in. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Gift of the Marion L. Ring Estate V. 426 Photo: Lee Stalsworth Page xx

still life (Natura morta),1946 Oil on canvas

33 x 44 cm 13 x 17 5/16 in. Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Giovanardi Collection V. 540 Page xx

white still life (Natura morta), 1946 Oil on canvas 30.8 x 48.6 cm 12 1/8 x 19 1/8 in Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon V. 517 Photo: Ron Jennings Page xx

still life (Natura morta),1947 Oil on canvas 43 x 60 cm 17 x 23 5/8 in. Private collection V. 570 Page xx

still life (Natura morta),1948 Oil on canvas 40 x 45 cm 15 3/4 x 17 3/4 in. Private collection V. 611 Page xx

still life (Natura morta),1948–49 Oil on canvas 38 x 45 cm 15 x 17 3/4 in. Private collection V. 754 Page xx

still life (Natura morta), 1949 Oil on canvas 40 x 47 cm 15 3/4 x 18 1/2 in. Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Giovanardi Collection V. 677 Page xx

still life (Natura morta), c. 1949 Oil on canvas 35.6 x 45.4 cm 14 x 17 7/8 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon V. 697 Page xx

still life (Natura morta), 1950 Oil on canvas 35.9 x 47.3 cm 14 1/8 x 18 5/8 in.

The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. V. 747 Page xx

still life (Natura morta), 1950 Oil on canvas 40.5 x 45.5 cm 15 15/16 x 17 15/16 in. Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Giovanardi Collection V. 763 Page xx

still life (Natura morta), 1951 Oil on canvas 35.8 x 40.3 cm 14 1/8 x 15 7/8 in. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Gift of the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Foundation M. Pasquali, Morandi. Opera catalogate tra il 1985 e il 2000 (Bologna: Museo Morandi, 2000), 57, 1951/4 Photo: Lee Stalsworth Page xx

still life (Natura morta), c. 1951 Oil on canvas

1 1 8 1 1 9

28.4 x 48.9 cm 11 1/4 x 19 1/4 in. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Gift of the Marion L. Ring Estate V. 1366 Photo: Lee Stalsworth Page xx

flowers (Fiori), 1952 Oil on canvas 45.5 x 45.5 cm 17 15/16 x 17 15/16 in. Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Giovanardi Collection V. 796 Page xx

still life (Natura morta), 1952 Oil on canvas 35 x 45 cm 13 3/4 x 17 3/4 in. Private collection V. 805 Page xx

still life (Natura morta), 1952 Oil on canvas 35 x 40 cm 13 3/4 x 15 3/4 in. Civiche Raccolte d’Arte,

Milan V. 831 Page xx

still life (Natura morta), 1952 Oil on canvas 40.6 x 40 16 x 15 3/4 in. Private collection V. 824 Page xx

still life (Natura morta), 1952 Oil on canvas 35.8 x 45.8 cm 14 1/8 x 18 in. Private collection V. 826 Page xx

still life (Natura morta), 1953 Oil on canvas 35 x 46 cm 13 3/4 x 18 1/8 in. Private collection V. 904 Page xx

still life (Natura morta), 1953 Oil on canvas 20.4 x 40.2 cm 8 x 15 7/8 in.

The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. V. 872 Page xx

still life (Natura morta), 1953 Oil on canvas 40.6 x 40.6 cm 16 x 16 in. Private collection V. 874 Page xx

still life (Natura morta), 1953–54 Oil on canvas 26 x 70 cm 10 1/4 x 27 9/16 in. Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Giovanardi Collection V. 896 Page xx

still life (Natura morta), 1953–54 Oil on canvas 31.1 x 40.6 cm 12 1/4 x 16 in. Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis, Mo. Gift of Professor and Mrs. Theo Haimann V. 924 Page xx

still life (Natura morta), 1953–54 Oil on canvas 26 x 70 cm 10 1/4 x 27 9/16 in. Private collection V. 895 Page xx

still life (Natura morta), 1954 Oil on canvas 35.6 x 46.4 cm 14 x 18 1/4 in. Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Mass. V. 918 Photo: David Stansbury Page xx

still life (Natura morta), 1954 Oil on canvas 35.6 x 45.5 cm 14 x 17 15/16 in. Private collection V. 920 Page xx

still life (Natura morta),1955 Oil on canvas 30.4 x 35.2 cm 12 x 13 7/8 in. Private collection V. 972 Page xx

still life (Natura morta), 1956 Oil on canvas 25.2 x 34.9 cm 9 7/8 x 13 3/4 in. Collection of Robert Lehrman, courtesy of Aimee and Robert Lehrman, Washington, D.C. V. 995 Page xx

still life (Natura morta), 1956 Oil on canvas 40.5 x 35.4 cm 15 15/16 x 13 15/16 in. Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Giovanardi Collection V. 986 Page xx

courtyard on via fondazzo, 1957 Oil on canvas 54 x 47 cm 21 5/16 x 18 1/2 in. Museo d’arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Rovereto, Italy, Giovanardi Collection V. 1070 Page xx

still life (Natura morta), 1959 Oil on canvas 25 x 28 cm 9 7/8 x 11 in. Private collection V. 1133 Page xx

still life (Natura morta), 1959 Oil on canvas 30.5 x 35.2 cm 12 x 13 7/8 in. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon V. 1137 Photo: Ron Jennings Page xx

still life (Natura morta), 1960 Oil on canvas 30 x 40 cm 11 13/16 x 15 3/4 in. Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Giovanardi Collection V. 1188 Page xx

still life (Natura morta), 1962 Oil on canvas 28.1 x 33.7 cm 11 1/16 x 13 1/4 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon V. 1275 Page xx

works not BY gIorgIo MorandI

Georges Braque (1882–1963) still life with coffee Pot, 1908 Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart Page xx <copyright credit>

Paul Cézanne (1839 –1906) still life, 1880 Hermitage, Saint Petersburg Page xx

Jean-Siméon Chardin (1699 –1779) la table d’office, 1763 Louvre, Paris Photo: Eric Lessing / Art Resource, NY Page xx

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796 –1875) View from the farnese gardens, Rome, 1826 The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Page xx

André Derain (1880 –1954) title, date Location <copyright credit> Page xx

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) still life, 1913 Location unknown <copyright credit> Page xx

Piero della Francesca (c. 1420–92) Madonna della Miseri-cordia, 1444–64 (detail) Pinacoteca Communale, Sansepolcro Photo: Scala / Art Resource, NY Page xx

1 2 1

Abramowicz, J. Giorgio Morandi: The Art of Silence. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004.

———. “The Liberation of the Ob-ject.” Art in America (March 1983).

Arcangeli, F. Giorgio Morandi. Milan: Edizioni del Milione, 1964.

———. Giorgio Morandi. Edited by L. Cesari. Turin: Allemandi, 2007.

———. “Morandi on Guido Reni of Bologna.” Art News (February 1955).

Argan, G. C. “Pittura italiana e cultura europea.” Prosa 3 (1946).

Arrigoni, L. “Morandi a Brera. Due dipinti nascosti.” Arte lombarda del secondo millennio. Saggi in onore di Gian Alberto dell’Acqua. Edited by F. Flores d’Arcais, M. Olivari, and L.Tognoli Bardin. Milan: Federico Motta, 2000.

Bandera, M. C., ed. Il carteggio Longhi-Pallucchini. Le prime bien-nali del dopoguerra 1948–1956.Milan: Charta, 1999.

———. “Miscellanea per Morandi.” Paragone 57 (2006).

———. Morandi a Firenze. I suoi amici, critici e collezionisti. Exh. cat. Milan: Mazzotta, 2005.

Bardi, P. M. 16 dipinti di Giorgio Morandi. Milan: Edizioni del Milione, 1956.

Beccaria, A. Giorgio Morandi. Milan: Hoepli, 1939.

Boschetto, A., ed. La collezione Roberto Longhi. Florence: Sansoni, 1971.

Brandi, C. “Europeismo e autono-mia di cultura nella moderna pittura italiana.” L’Imagine 3 (June 1947).

———. Morandi. Florence: Le Monnier, 1942. Second edition with postscript, 1953.

———. Morandi. Edited by V. Ru-biu and M. Pasquali. Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1990.

Braun, E. “Speaking Volumes: Giorgio Morandi’s Still Lifes and the Cultural Politics of Strapaese.” Modernism/Modernity 2, 3 (Sep-tember 1995): 89–116.

Briganti, G., and E. Coen, eds. I paesaggi di Morandi. Turin: Allemandi, 1984.

———, eds. La pittura metafisica. Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1979.

Calvesi, M. La metafisica schiarita. Da de Chirico a Carrà, da Morandi a Savinio. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1982.

Capolavori del ‘900 italiano. La collezione Giovanardi. Exh. cat. Rovereto: MART / Nicolodi, 2005.

Giorgio Morandi. Exh. cat. Edited by P. G. Castagnoli. Turin: Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contem-poranea / Allemandi, 2000.

Cordaro, M., ed. Morandi. Incisioni. Catalogo generale. Milan: Electa, 1991.

Cossu, M., and S. Pinto. La collezione Brandi Rubiu. Rome: SACS, 2001.

Crispolti, E. L’oggetto Morandi. Fiesole: Cadmo, 1998.

D’Amico, F. Morandi. Milan: 5 Continents, 2004.

De Salvo, D., and M. Gale. Giorgio Morandi. London: Tate, 2001.

Fergonzi, F. La collezione Mattioli. Capolavori dell’avanguardia italiana. Milan: Skira, 2003.

———. “Un contratto inedito tra Giorgio Morandi e Mario Broglio: Identificazioni delle opere, storia collezionistica e novità cronologiche del Morandi metafisico e post-metafisico.” Saggi e Memorie di Storia dell’Arte 26 (2003).

s e l e c t e d B I B l I o g r a P h Y

1 2 2 1 2 3

———. “Sfide visive per l’esordiente Morandi.” Arte in Friuli Arte a Trieste 21–2 (2003).

Fossati, P. Storie di figure e di im-magini. Da Boccioni a Licini. Turin: Einaudi, 1995.

Frongia, M. L. Morandi nella collezione Ingrao. Epistolario Morandi-Ingrao 1946–1964. Nuoro: Ilisso, 2001.

Giorgio Morandi. Exh. cat. Milan: Rotonda della Besana, 1971.

Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964). Exh. cat. Rome: Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, 1973.

Giorgio Morandi. Exh. cat. Paris: Hotel de Ville, 1987.

Giorgio Morandi 1890–1964. Exh. cat. Edited by M. C. Bandera and R. Miracco. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art / Milan: Skira, 2008.

Giudici, L., ed. G. Morandi, lettere. Milan: Abscondita, 2004.

Gnudi, C. Morandi. Florence: Ediz-ioni U, 1946.

Gregori, M., and G. Romano, eds. La collezione di Roberto Longhi: Dal Duecento a Caravaggio a Mo-randi. Savigliano: L’Artistica, 2007.

Longhi, R. Opere complete di Ro-berto Longhi 14. Florence: Sansoni, 1984.

Maestri del ‘900: Da Boccioni a Fontana. La collezione di un raf-finato cultore dell’arte moderna. Exh. cat. Rovereto: MART / Milan: Skira, 2007.

Magnani, L. Il mio Morandi. Turin: Einaudi, 1982.

Maltese, C. Storia dell’arte in Italia, 1785–1943. Turin: Einaudi, 1960.

Mandelli, P. “Storia di una monografia.” Accademia Clemen-tina. Atti e Memorie 35–6 (1996).

Mazzocca, F., ed. “Collezione Jesi.” Musei e Gallerie di Milano. Pinacoteca di Brera. Dipinti dell’Ottocento e del Novecento. Collezioni dell’Accademia e della Pinacoteca 2. Milan: Electa, 1994.

———. “Morandi e il suo tempo. I incontro internazionale di studi su Giorgio Morandi.” Quaderni moran-diani 1 (1985).

Un milanese che parla toscano. Lamberto Vitali e la sua collezione. Milan: Pinacoteca di Brera / Electa, 2001.

Morandi e il suo tempo. Exh. cat. Edited by F. Solmi. Bologna: Gal-leria Comunale d’Arte Moderna / Mazzotta, 1985.

Morandi e Milano. Exh. cat. Milan: Palazzo Reale / Electa, 1990.

Morandi ultimo. Nature morte 1950–1964. Edited by L. Mattioli Rossi. Milan: Mazzotta, 1997.

Müller, R. Das Frühwerk von Gior-gio Morandi 1910–1921. Munich: Akademischer Verlag, 1998.

Museo Morandi. Bologna. Il catalogo. Milan: Charta, 1993, 353–82.

Museo Morandi. Catalogo generale. Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2004, 544–75.

Parronchi, A., ed. 72 missive di Giorgio Morandi ad Alessandro Par-ronchi. Florence: Polistampa, 2000.

Pasquali, M. Giorgio Morandi. Mostra del centenario. Exh. cat. Bologna: Galleria Comunale d’Arte Moderna, 1990.

———, ed. Giorgio Morandi nelle raccolte romane. Rome: Campaiola Studio d’Arte, 2003.

———. Giorgio Morandi. Saggi e ricerche 1990–2007. Prato: Noèdiz-ioni, 2007.

———. “Morandi.” Art e Dossier 50 (1990).

———. Morandi. Acquerelli. Cata-logo generale. Milan: Electa, 1991.

———. Morandi. Opere catalogate tra il 1985 e il 2000. Bologna: Museo Morandi / Musica Insieme, 2000.

———. “Prove di un’amicizia vera: Nove lettere di Giorgio Morandi a Mino Maccari.” L’Archiginnasio 100 (2007): 481–516.

——— and E. Tavoni. Morandi. Disegni. Catalogo generale. Milan: Electa, 1994.

E. Pontiggia. Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964). Exh. cat. Kamakura and Hayama: Museum of Modern Art, 1989.

“A Prato per vedere i Corot,” Corri-spondenza Morandi-Soffici. Exh. cat. Edited by L. Cavallo. Milan: Farsetti, 1989.

Ragghianti, C. L. Opere di Carlo L. Ragghianti 8. Bologna: Calderini, 1982.

Raimondi, G. Anni con Giorgio Mo-randi. Milan: Mondadori, 1970.

———. “La congiuntura metafi-sica Morandi-Carrà.” Paragone 19 (July 1951): 18–27.

———. “Le stampe di Giorgio Morandi.” Proporzioni 2 (1948): 147–58.

Roche-Pézard, F. “Les apprêts de Morandi ou l’expérience poussée à bout.” Revue de l’art 144 (2004): 19–26.

Roditi, E. Dialogues on Art. Lon-don: Secker and Warburg, 1960.

Tillim, S. “Morandi: A Critical Note and a Memoir.” Artforum (Septem-ber 1967): 42–6.

Tosini Pizzetti, S., ed. Fondazione Magnani Rocca. Catalogo generale. Florence: Nardini, 2001.

Vitali, L. Morandi. Catalogo generale. Milan: Electa, 1977. Expanded edition, 1983.

———. Giorgio Morandi pittore. Milan: Edizioni del Milione, 1964.

———. Giorgio Morandi. Opera grafica. Turin: Einaudi, 1957.

Wilkin, K. Giorgio Morandi. Edited by R. Miracco. New York: Italian Cul-tural Institute; Milan: Charta, 2008.

Zurlini, V. Il tempo di Morandi. Reg-gio Emilia: Prandi, 1975.

1 2 4 1 2 5P h o t o g r a P h I c c r e d I t s

luciano calzolariPhotographs of Morandi’s studio© Calzolari Studio, BolognaPage xx; Page xx; Page xx; Page xx; Page xx

Matteo de fina Page xx

nicola eccher, MartPage xx; Page xx; Page xx; Page xx

foto saporetti, MilanPage xx; Page xx; Page xx; Page xx; Page xx; Page xx; Page xx; Page xx; Page xx; Page xx; Page xx; Page xx; Page xx; Page xx; Page xx; Page xx

leo lionniGiorgio Morandi in his studioPage xxSkira Editore, Milan

herbert listGiorgio Morandi in his studio, 1953Page xxMagnum Photos

ugo MulasGiorgio Morandi, 1964Page xxUgo Mulas Heirs. All rights reserved.

still from federico fellini’s La dolce vita, 1960Page xx© RA/ASC/AFE, Rome

First published in the United States of America in 2009 by The Phillips Collection1600 21st Street, NWWashington, D.C. 20009www.phillipscollection.org

Copyright © The Phillips Collection

All works by Giorgio Morandi© 2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior consent of the publishers.

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data<INSERT HERE>

ISBN 978-0-943044-34-7

Published on the occasion of the exhibition, Morandi: Master of Modern Still Life, organized by MART, Rovereto, Italy, in collaboration with The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

Proudly sponsored by

the exhibition is generously supported by fenner and Ina Milton.

February 21– May 24, 2009The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

Publication produced by the Phillips collection

editor in chiefJohanna Halford-MacLeod

translatorLucian Comoy

designerClaude Skelton Design Inc.

Printed in Germany

the Phillips collection

directorDorothy Kosinski

chief curatorEliza Rathbone

chief registrar and director of special InitiativesJoseph Holbach

assistant registrar for exhibitions and collectionSarah Anderson

Mart Museo di arte Moderna e contemporanea di trento e rovereto

director Gabriella Belli

curatorsElisabetta Barisoni Flavio Fergonzi

registrarClarenza Catullo

Photographic archivistAttilio Begher

supervisor, Public relations and communicationsFlavia Fossa Margutti

Press officersLuca MelchionnaClementina Rizzi

1 2 9