The paper's reporter Lu Linhan sorted it out
Giorgio Morandi (born 20 July 1890 in Bologna) is a famous Italian printmaker and oil painter. On July 8, 2022, the exhibition "Giorgio Morandi" opened at the Jiushi Art Museum in Shanghai, featuring 51 works by Morandi, including 39 oil paintings, 6 original prints, 4 watercolors and 2 sketches, spanning nearly 50 years of his creative career.
The Paper, Art Review (www.thepaper.cn) has compiled and introduced a selection of works from the "Giorgio Morandi" exhibition.
Photo of Giorgio Morandi in Grizzana, a suburb of Bologna
Giorgio Morandi was born in Bologna on July 20, 1890. After the death of his father, his mother moved with him and his three sisters to Via Fondazza 36, where the family lived and the four siblings never married. In the summer, Morandi spends the summer in a country house in The Tuscany of Grazana. In addition, he rarely left Bologna, at best going to Rome, Venice or Florence for exhibitions.
Showroom scene
Showroom scene
Throughout Morandi's artistic creations, his painting subjects are limited to still lifes and a small number of landscapes. He devoted his life to the positional relationship of bottles and cans in the bedroom, carefully creating shades of light and shade on the canvas. The landscape paintings he left behind were all painted in the studio against the window.
In the early days of Morandi's artistic creation, Cézanne, Futurism, Cubism, and even Kirico's metaphysical school had an impact on it.
Morandi, Still Life, Oil on Canvas, 1914
In the exhibition hall, a painting seems to be significantly different from the characteristics of Morandi's paintings in the impression. The lines of the ling calendar, the deep tones, and the fast-paced object form make people feel a mysterious and rough atmosphere. This still life, created in 1914, is a representative of Morandi's early paintings. At that time, he had just graduated from the Bologna Academy of Fine Arts and was in the process of exploring his own creative style. After shifting his interest in the Impressionist style of painting, he began a new direction of exploration.
In this still life, you can see both the shadow of Picasso, the originator of Cubism, and the traces of Boccini, the pioneer of Futurist painting. The objects in the painting resemble a passionate symphony in the interwoven blocks, while the artist tries to transform air, light and sound into form; The neutral and balanced tone makes people lose their judgment of the object itself, thus displaying the forms of still lifes in different spaces in the same space in a multi-dimensional way. In this painting, you may also feel the simultaneous combination of abstraction and figuration, deeply expressing the beauty of power, movement and space.
Picasso, My Jasmine, 1911-1912 (not in this exhibit)
In 1909, the Italian poet Marinette published a Futuristic Manifesto in the French newspaper Le Figaro, and Morandi's presentation in his 1914 still life seems to maintain some consistency with the former. Perhaps we can see that Morandi at that time was interested in structure, spatial experimentation, and popular art trends. However, with the end of World War I in 1918, Futurism gradually declined, and Morandi's creative style gradually turned in a new direction.
Morandi, Still Life, Oil on Canvas, 1928
The group of still lifes above is one of Morandi's most common reddish-brown still lifes around the 1930s. At this time, Morandi's depiction of objects has completely jumped out of any past school of painting and returned to a painting path that does not belong to any art group.
Look closely at this group of still lifes, how will you feel? The clay pots, wine bottles, and utensils on the tabletops seemed to be covered with a thin layer of dust, and the yellow and dark brown tabletops in the background made people trance into a room that had been dusty for many years. All the objects look so serene and hazy, like medieval frescoes that have traveled through centuries, exuding the sedimentation of time.
Like italy, a country steeped in history, Morandi was also heavily influenced by the classical masters of the Renaissance such as Giotto and Masaccio during this period. Those paintings and murals of the medieval period, because of the influence of technology and painting materials, coupled with a long period of time, all show a gray tone, which looks less bright, but has a more classical and holy atmosphere. It is precisely in color that Morandi extracted this unique "gray tone" of classicism. When modulating colors, he will deliberately mix dust, paint and other materials into the pigments, and will also imitate the creation method of Italian murals, mixing different natural clay pigments to create a unique "Morandi color". In the middle and late period, the colors used in Morandi's paintings became more and more cold and hazy. These subtle and charming colors are now also used in many fields including fashion, design, film and so on.
Morandi, Striped Vase and Flowers, etching, 1924
As early as 1912, Morandi began experimenting with etching prints. For more than twenty years, from 1930 to 1956, Morandi taught engraving and etching at the Bologna Academy of Fine Arts, where he taught copperplate techniques.
In this work, created in 1924, Morandi began to focus on the form of individual objects in space. His lines are delicate but powerful, and the flowers in the bottle are not carefully depicted, but focus on the overall block surface and the light and shade of the light. The shape of the vase is similar to the Doric column style of the ancient Roman period, and the overall picture reveals the solemnity and tranquility of the building.
Grizzana
Morandi, Courtyard of Fondaza Avenue, oil on canvas, 1957
In Bologna and Grizzana, Morandi spent much of his life, and almost all of his landscape paintings came from these two places. The window of his studio on Via Fontzada was often his only connection to the world around him, through which his gaze wandered over the high and low walls, wandering over several nearby houses, and in the middle of a small courtyard with an olive tree in the middle. From the 1930s onwards, "The Courtyard in Via Fondazza" was his most frequently depicted subject. Many times, he presents the picture in diagonal perspective, and the white road at the oblique angle often becomes the center of the image.
Morandi, White Road, etching, 1933
This print is called The White Road. Look closely at its composition and details, and the oil paintings on the side depict the same landscape, but each has a different expression of emotion. Morandi's enlightenment in the field of etching printmaking came from the Dutch master Rembrandt, so Morandi's portrayal of light and shadow and layers also followed the characteristics of his predecessors in particular. A large number of regular and delicate lines contrast with the white sky and paths, and although they are prints, they still have a warm and soft visual feeling like oil paintings. Leaves and houses exude a subtle, misty texture in the light. The whole picture, as its name suggests, is delicate and steady. It seems to be a path to the heart, and at the end of the path is the valley, and on the other side of the valley is the rich and bright spiritual world of Morandi.
Morandi, White Road, oil painting, 1941
If this white path in the black and white world is a secret passage to the heart, then this gray-toned path is like a poetic dream that has hidden time. In this work, the gray-blue sky seems to be a prelude to the approaching night, the tree houses lose their shadows, and the end of the path is sealed.
Compared to the print "White Road", this sketch was created eight years later. The ambiguity and restraint of that no-man's land became more and more apparent. If in the early days of creation, because of the influence of Cubism and Impressionism, Morandi still used relatively traditional ways of shaping objects such as shadows, virtual reality and contour lines, then over time, he gradually changed the way he painted, and re-shaped in the form, overlap, cutting and rational layout of the space produced by the object. This transformation makes his paintings appear pure, natural, and have vitality from the inside out. When we look at Morandi's paintings, we can't understand it, but only through long-term gaze, leaving the feeling itself.
Morandi's painting subjects and objects are consistent. After World War II, Morandi's images became more concise, focusing on a few combinations and extremely simple and continuous variants. Each of his new creations can be seen not only as a single work, but also as an artistic exploration that has evolved over time, seemingly with no intention of earning himself any fame. In an era when avant-garde art was all the rage, his artistic exploration and the times did not seem to be clearly related. The rigorous forms in his still lifes, which the critic and art historian Francesco Arcangeli called "variations of a given combined subject", are accompanied by a calm environment. This profound inflection of colour and tone is even more pronounced in his floral works.
Morandi, still life, watercolor on paper, 1949
The poet Jacobite once described Morandi's colors this way: "It is as if it were the color of winter, wood and snow." ”
In this painting, we can feel this atmosphere even more. Against a warm, elegant gray-yellow background, still lifes are placed in the middle of the picture. It is like a grass pile in the field, with a quiet and peaceful forbearance and warmth. The simpler, the more mundane things are, the more liberated they are from superfluous interpretations.
The work was created in 1949, the year he was about to usher in the year of the flower armor. For most of his life with still life, Morandi has been alone. Like his paintings, he reminds us of the old peasants, of the monks, of the wise men who can keep their hearts alone in the hustle and bustle of the city. Looking at the objects in the painting, it is as if given a firm force, which allows us to believe that only by looking inward can we become rich; Settle yourself in so that you can see the light before dawn.
Morandi, Still Life, Oil on Canvas, 1949
Morandi, still life, oil on canvas, 1951
Compared with the still life works of the past, Morandi at this time began to gradually reduce the number of items on the table, paying more attention to the combination of a small number of containers, and the relationship between the containers became small and tight, most of them leaning on the edge of the desktop, creating a set of regular and harmonious sense of order. The colors are more pure and natural, the picture is extremely unified, and a rich and subtle, simple and simple painting language is created in the blunt object form.
In 1956, Morandi retired from the Bologna Academy of Fine Arts and settled in a house on the outskirts for a long time. Unlike many artists, Morandi's late paintings reached a certain peak, and in the short period of eight years of his later period, he completed about sixty percent of his life's paintings. At this time, his painting language was also greatly refined and risen.
Morandi, Still Life, Oil on Canvas, 1960
This work, created in 1960, is one of his late works. We can see that the shape of the still life is increasingly simplified to geometric shapes, the contours of the form and the spatial relationship are more blurred, the relationship between the front and back is naturally integrated, and the use of gray tones tends to be maximized. Morandi has explained that he hopes to represent the process of fusion between objects and images, as well as the internal structure, in the process of mutual integration, but also create a new space. If you look closely at the edge lines between the still lifes in the picture, you will find that they seem to penetrate each other and have subtle changes. This also makes his picture seem simple, but in fact it is full of rich dramatic effects, both real and abstract, reaching the point of being fascinating.
In early Western art, academic artists attached great importance to the perspective and relationship of objects, but Morandi broke through this layer of taboos, and in an equal posture, he integrated himself and the artifact, with his own eyes as a yardstick for measuring objects, and restored the appearance of things themselves with rational, orderly pictures.
Morandi, Still Life, Oil on Canvas, 1953-1954
Morandi, Still Life, Oil on Canvas, 1956
(The relevant information in this article comes from Shanghai Jiushi Art Museum and "Follow the Art Tour".) ）
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