Go See: Giorgio Morandi, 1890-1964 Retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through December 14

October 1st, 2008


Still Life (Natura morta) (1943), Giorgio Morandi via [Metropolitan Museum of Art]

‘Giorgio Morandi, 1890-1964’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is the first  exhibit of its size and scope in the United States, displaying approximately one hundred still life paintings and a dozen landscapes. Composed with narrow-ranging hues of cream, brown, and gray, Morandi projects a study of rhythm, balance and intricacy of shape with his identifiable style. The show includes works which span Morandi’s 50-year tenure as a painter and track the lineage of the painter’s influence upon Cézanne, Cubism, Futurism, and the pittura metafisica of Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà.  In addition, the intimacy of the underground gallery of the Robert Lehman wing provides well-suited location for the subtleties of such an artist.

All That Life Contains, Contained [NYTimes]
Morandi’s Subtle Spectable
[NYSun]
Tables for One
[New Yorker]
Giorgio Morandi, 1890-1964
[Met Museum]
Museo Morandi Website


Landscape (Paesaggio) (1935), Giorgio Morandi via [Metropolitan Museum of Art]

Morandi’s Italian still-life paintings were considered to be born out of his reclusive nature. Spending most of his life in a single apartment and rarely venturing far, Morandi’s existence was one of mysterious involvements until his death at the age of seventy-three. Nonetheless Morandi utilized the “ambiguity of ‘size or location’ as the key to [his] indelible modernity” and was, “free of the organizing prejudice of perspective.” via [New Yorker]


Still Life (Natura morta) (1913), Giorgio Morandi via [Metropolitan Museum of Art]


Still Life (Natura morta) (1956), Giorgio Morandi via [Metropolitan Museum of Art]


Still Life (Natura morta) (1951), Giorgio Morandi via [Metropolitan Museum of Art]


Still Life (Natura morta) (1941), Giorgio Morandi via [Metropolitan Museum of Art]