The poetic and unmistakable art of Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964) crosses the Channel to reach London, the European capital of modernity, and overwhelms it with the gentle strokes of still lifes that at the same time resemble horizons kissed by the light of sunset. What Morandi conveys is a profound sense of peace.
He succeeds in this even through the watercolours and etchings on display at the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, north of the City, which has chosen the intimate art of the Bolognese artist to celebrate its first fifteen years of activity. Around eighty works, mostly from the Galleria d’Arte Maggiore in Bologna, are arranged chronologically, some of which are true rarities for the British public.
Visitors may encounter domestic elements (fruit, bottles, jugs, baskets, vases, flowers) gathered, assembled, and elevated in Morandi’s metaphysical manner, or landscapes with sunlit hills and trees with slender trunks. The journey explores the stylistic versatility of a poet of the palette who first looked to Cézanne and later to De Chirico, who described him as “a master in revealing the metaphysical dimensions of the most ordinary objects.”
The exhibition allows visitors to become acquainted with Morandi the engraver, with his ability to explore contrasts between shadow and light, and reflections—whether engraving the “crowns” of trees held up by slender trunks reflected in the waters of rivers, or when the protagonists become jugs playing with the reflections of nearby bottles.
As time passes, the works evolve and become richer in elements, shifting from evident Futurist influence to a composition attentive to the dynamism of space and metaphorical narration. Then the blacks and whites of the etchings give way to the soft colours of the watercolours, which stain the paper in a defined, sharp manner, intensifying that sense of peace that each work conveys.
The exhibition is accompanied by a series of photographs titles "Imagined Landscapes: The Places of Morandi" by Nino Migliori, shot during the 80s in Grizzana, the little town on Bolognese Appennino where Morandi stayed during summer. Traces of those places are indeed found in lots of his masterpieces.
Giorgio Morandi
Lines of Poetry
16 January - 7 April 2013
