Giorgio Morandi

There is a useful article in Christie’s Online Magazine about Giorgio Morandi “arguably the greatest Italian painter of the twentieth century”.

“From the early 1920s until the early 1960s, Morandi’s paintings show remarkable consistency. He has by now hit upon his trademark pictures: still-life arrangements of bottles, vases and jugs on a table, painted in largely sombre colours (greys, browns and chalky whites, above all). Superficially, these may all look similar. However, his painting is full of subtle shifts and inflections, dependent on precisely which objects are placed where; in what combination; and under what sort of light. Such was Morandi’s attention to detail that his slight shift of a bottle has been compared to the chess move of a grand master.

Morandi was an ascetic who reveled in frugality:

“He’s remembered as a simple, reclusive figure who went by the nickname of Il Monaco (‘The Monk’). A lifelong bachelor, he lived most of his adult life in a modest apartment with his three sisters, his bedroom doubling as a studio. As he himself put it, ‘I’m a painter of the kind of… composition that communicates a sense of tranquility and privacy, moods which I have always valued above all’.

An interesting article about a painter I barely knew before.