Morandi ultimo. Nature morte 1950-1964
curated by Laura Mattioli Rossi
14.12.1997 — 28.02.1998
Show introduction
In the past there were many exhibitions of work by Giorgio Morandi, mostly interested in documenting his whole creative path, and considering his later art as the natural evolution of the preceding experiences. In the same way, critics often focussed their attention on the works created up until the end of the 1940s, and making no in-depth inquiries into the following period, which seems mostly unexplored. In fact, in a century dominated by the avant-gardes and by a concept of art as a continuous redefinition of itself and of its own role, the position of Morandi, often seen as an isolated defender of “good painting” in the traditional genre of still-life, must be revisited in methodological terms and in relationship to contemporary artistic results, for which the works of the last period, above all, are determinate.
The exhibition held from December 14, 1997 at Galleria dello Scudo, Verona, realized with the collaboration of the Museo Morandi, Bologna and under the patronage of the Municipality Department of Culture, City of Verona, therefore presented a particular aspect of the work by the Bolognese artist, proposing a new analysis of the still-lifes created from the post-war period until 1964, the year of his death.
With a selection of more than fifty paintings from prestigious public and private collections in Italy and abroad, the exhibition, strictly systematic, highlighted how the works from 1950 onwards, were stylistically and conceptually new: the obsessive repetition of the same subject, with only variations of tone, composition, and angle, were a problem that has always eluded specialists but is basic for an understanding of the last paintings.
After the first examples of diagonal construction, in which there was still indicated the plane (as in the 1951 canvas belonging to the Giovanardi collection), the space found a different, experimental dimension in the works in which the elements were laid out horizontally, one in front of the other (an example is the Natura morta painted in 1953 and now in the collection of Rodolfo Pallucchini), to the point of determining the accented lengthening of the format which characterised some extraordinary paintings from 1954.
↣ Read moreInstallation view
Artist
Among the protagonists of 20th-century Italian painting and one of the most popular engravers of that period, after the first exhibitions with the Futurists and his adherence to metaphysics with Carrà and de Chirico in 1918, he joined the “Valori plastici” group in 1920. Objects such as bottles, vases, flowers and bowls, arranged on a tabletop, are the protagonists of his still lifes, based on refined tonal values.
