GIORGIO MORANDI (Italian, 1890-1964) painted simple still lifes, more or less without backgrounds, of bottles, bowls, and vases, often depicting the same familiar bottles in multiple works. His color palette was muted, pale creams, beiges, grays, off-whites, and whites. This sounds about as boring as you can imagine, however these plain little bottles and bowls and vases feel like figures in figure paintings, full of amazing personality; stars of little stages. The compositions near abstraction from their simplicity, limited value and depth, and lack of detailed background. He focused on subtle gradations of hue, tone, and compositional balance of arrangement, and the results are just beautiful; precious. He made around 1350 of these oil paintings, and they were featured in films by Fellini and Antonioni. President Barack Obama selected two of his works which are now part of the White House collection. He was said to be quiet, polite, and enigmatic. He died of lung cancer.
Above, Marcello Mastroianni and Alan Cluny view and discuss Giorgio Morandi‘s Still Life (1941), In Federico Fellini’s Italian film, La Dolce Vita (1960):
“Listen, I see that you have a wonderful Morandi.”
“Oh, yes, he’s my favorite painter. The objects are flooded with a wistful light and yet painted with such a detachment, precision, rigor that makes them almost tangible. You can say that it’s an art where nothing is coincidental.”
Read the comic book, “Brush with Peril”:
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