A complete overview of the Giorgio Morandi exhibition in NY and Bologna.

Giorgio Morandi is an undisputed master of twentieth-century painting. His greatness lies in the balance between an outlook typical of the Age of Enlightenment and the formal synthesis of Cézanne and modernism.

Often remembered as a reserved and reclusive man, inclined toward a “cloistered” lifestyle, Morandi, in reality, was a highly sensitive interpreter of the spirit of his times. Through constant attention to differing artistic and cultural movements, he succeeded in translating the aspirations they embodied into the variants of an unfailingly autonomous approach to painting.

This volume provides a complete overview of the major exhibition of masterpieces by Giorgio Morandi at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Museo d’Arte Moderna in Bologna (MAMbo). Over one hundred paintings, watercolors, drawings, and etchings illustrate the artist’s entire creative and poetic course from the landscapes and still lifes of 1913–1914 to his final works of 1963–1964. Particular attention is focused on the masterpieces of the 1920s and 1930s, in which Morandi perfected his extraordinary approach to image-making through in-depth investigation of the world and of human existence as filtered through the metaphor of the still life.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art New York, New York
16 settembre – 14 dicembre 2008
MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna
22 gennaio – 12 aprile 2009

Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964), an Italian painter and printmaker renowned for his simple yet stunning still lifes, is also famous for his legendary reputation as a recluse, an artist who resided in a world bound by the walls of his Bologna studio.

Giorgio Morandi: The Art of Silence is the first and only study in English to cover Morandi's career in its entirety as well as in the sociopolitical and cultural context of Italian art. Janet Abramowicz, Morandi's former teaching assistant, takes the reader through half a century of Italian art history and its most significant movements - Futurism, Pittura Metafisica, Valori Plastici, Strapaese, Novecento - most of which have received scant attention from English-language scholars.

Abramowicz shows how Morandi worked in close proximity to mainstream contemporary European art and tells the story of his relationship to the Fascist politics and patrons of his time, illustrating how his connections to this period were muted after the fall of the regime in post-World War II Italy in an effort to establish the artist as apolitical. Morandi was the only Italian modernist to emerge from Fascism unscathed.

An important new addition to scholarship on twentieth-century Italian art history, this book features many rare and previously unpublished images and will fascinate admirers of Morandi and his quietly transcendent work.

Throughout his long career, Morandi focused on still lifes and landscapes that captured the simple beauty of light and form. While his contemporaries struggled with the intellectual turmoil and aesthetic experimentation of the twentieth century, Morandi remained faithful to the subjects that fascinated him most: bottles, vases, and jugs, and the view out his studio window in Bologna. This richly illustrated volume brings together more than one hundred of his most important works. Grouped according to technique paintings, watercolors, drawings, and etchings each aspect of his work is given thoughtful consideration by scholars who explore Morandi's genius for composition, his serene palette, and his expertise as a draftsman.