Giorgio Morandi: The Art of Silence
?Text by Janet Abramowicz
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 dispels this myth and 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important addition to scholarship on twentieth-century Italian art history, this book features many rare and previously unpublished images and will fascinate admirers of Morandi and his transcendent work.
Publisher: Yale University Press
Artists: Giorgio Morandi
Contributors: Janet Abramowicz
Publication Date: 2005
Binding: Hardcover
Dimensions: 7 x 10 1/2 in (17.8 x 26.7 cm)
Pages: 288
Reproductions: 41 color, 71 b&w
ISBN: 9780300100365
Retail: $80
Status: Available
Giorgio Morandi
Giorgio Morandi was born in 1890 in Bologna, Italy, where he lived until his death in 1964. Over the course of his five-decade career, Morandi was most prolific during the postwar years from the late 1940s until the 1960s, when he executed more than half of his entire output of paintings. Remaining dedicated to the repertoire of subjects that had occupied him since the early 1910s, including tabletop still lifes of bottles, boxes, vases, and flowers, as well as occasional landscapes, his variations on a given compositional motif became more persistent, nuanced, and abstract in the later part of his life. Through subtle shifts in color, tone, scale, composition, and mark-making, Morandi was able to convey the ever-changing perceptual understanding and memory of the objects and spaces one encounters. In 1993, the Museo Morandi was established in Bologna, Italy, and is currently located in the Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna.
All Giorgio Morandi books