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 new addition to scholarship on twentieth-century Italian art history, this book features many rare and previously unpublished images and will fascinate admirers of Morandi and his transcendent work.
A stranger who sat beside me on the plane on my way to Manila happened to be an artist as well. He showed and recommended this book to me. I've read a few pages of it and I fell in love with Morandi's works. The book gave me an insight on how he shifted from one style to the other until he found his own art and I had a better understanding of what pittura metafisica is all about now.