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Lot Essay
Morandi has always defied easy categorization and his arcane, personal paintings have little to do with the political motivations and machinations of the avant-garde Novocento Italiano group with whom he exhibited in the late 1920s. He simply painted and etched. From 1929 he was increasingly able to do precisely that, when he secured the post of professor of etching at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Bologna. This appointment lent him a certain amount of kudos and recognition, but more importantly a moderate financial security that allowed him to live the hermitic life he preferred. Painting daily in his simple cell-like studio-bedroom in the residence he shared with his sisters, the simple repetitive habits of his lifestyle imbued his works with the sense of calm and meditation he had always sought and would always retain.
Morandi lived a local life in a way that few other artists of the modern era have. He seldom traveled, and certainly not abroad apart from a handful of crossings into Switzerland. He was born and bred, breathed and fed in Bologna. Although his tastes and interests were wide-ranging, he was fiercely proud of his local artistic antecedents and amassed a large collection of religious art, frescoes, oil paintings and manuscript leaves from bygone zeniths of Bolognese art. These legacies of his forebears were sources of interest but more importantly of inspiration for Morandi. Leo Longanesi, describing Morandi in 1928, commented on the paradoxically local feeling of the artist's anonymous-looking still-lifes: "To look at one of his paintings means to know his character, his family, his house, his street, his town. His slightly hazy palette is that of lowly Bologna with its quiet alleyways, its crockery stores, bakeries, groceries and junk shops shunned by the downtown residents. His delicate gossamer light is that which glimmers in the street where he lives, and one never needs squint against the glare of an impudent and overbearing sun" (quoted in L. Klepac, Giorgio Morandi: the dimension of inner space, Sydney, 1997, p. 90).
Morandi lived a local life in a way that few other artists of the modern era have. He seldom traveled, and certainly not abroad apart from a handful of crossings into Switzerland. He was born and bred, breathed and fed in Bologna. Although his tastes and interests were wide-ranging, he was fiercely proud of his local artistic antecedents and amassed a large collection of religious art, frescoes, oil paintings and manuscript leaves from bygone zeniths of Bolognese art. These legacies of his forebears were sources of interest but more importantly of inspiration for Morandi. Leo Longanesi, describing Morandi in 1928, commented on the paradoxically local feeling of the artist's anonymous-looking still-lifes: "To look at one of his paintings means to know his character, his family, his house, his street, his town. His slightly hazy palette is that of lowly Bologna with its quiet alleyways, its crockery stores, bakeries, groceries and junk shops shunned by the downtown residents. His delicate gossamer light is that which glimmers in the street where he lives, and one never needs squint against the glare of an impudent and overbearing sun" (quoted in L. Klepac, Giorgio Morandi: the dimension of inner space, Sydney, 1997, p. 90).