What do you think?
Rate this book
Giorgio Morandi 1890-1964
This volume showcases 116 masterpieces arranged into the four major themes that characterize Giorgio Morandi’s work: self portraits, still lifes, landscapes, and flowers. The collection represents all the various expressive techniques used by Morandi over the years, including paint, etching, drawing and watercolor.The volume is the catalog of an outstanding exhibition organized by the Metropolitan Museum in New York and by the Museo d’Arte Moderna in Bologna. The exhibition will be open in New York from September 16 to December 14, 2008 and in Bologna from January 22 to April 12, 2009.The exhibition and the catalog also contain a number of photographs of Morandi’s studio and quotes from his admirers, as well as the memorable 1958 interview with Edouard Roditi.
- GenresArtVisual Art
366 pages, Hardcover
First published September 16, 2008
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
November 13, 2024
The last time someone took out this book from my library was July this year, more than 3 months ago. They left their hold slip in the book.
Their bookmarks are also still in this heavy collection, presumably to mark the paintings that resonated with them the most.
Not many people take out art related books from my library, not even those from the artists that are household names, which means that I get to enjoy all the art books for long periods of time, without having to worry about the need of another person. However, it’s also a lonely experience, knowing that rarely anyone cares about what brings me so much comfort and spiritual consolation.
The paintings in this book that are bookmarked are not the ones I particularly admire, however, it brings me much joy to know someone probably loves the Morandi’ art as much as I do. A stranger, in my city.
Notes :
Essay : Modern Restlessness
He ( Morandi) is endless dilation. He is like the Aleph, “ a point from which one can catch sight of infinity.”
Both the director Bernardo Bertolucci and his father Attilio Bertolucci love Morandi. Attilio put Morandi together with Giotto ( facades or sides of houses that are often blank , which refer to “a common monumentality”)
B. Bertolucci:
“In Morandi, if you look carefully, you can catch a glimpse of a point from which... a bit like in one of Borges' stories called The Aleph. The Aleph is a point from which (no one knows how) you can see a huge number of other things in the world, all at the same time - and that's it, in Morandi's pictures, apparently so simple, so rigorous, there's always a place, a point from which you can catch sight of infinity, which is also the infinity of his poetry, so calm and subdued."
Morandi’s key artists:
Giotto, Masaccio, Piero, Bellini, Titian, Chardin, Corot, Renoir and Cézanne
Still life:
Objects stripped of every function they ever had, and sometimes not even recognisable, these are pure forms despoiled of every descriptive identity: images, opportunities for paint, pretexts for painting.
—-
Like an architect studying the plan of a building, Morandi defined the base of his objects by drawing their outlines in pencil on the pieces of paper on which he arranged them ; he examined their volumes, scaled their relationships in height, accentuating their monu-mentality, so that his Still Lifes were seen by contemporaries as "spires of a Gothic cathedral"or "towers that rise above the view of a city,"or, in the sensitive, anxiety-cloaked words of a great New York writer of our own time, Don DeLillo, as something akin to the Twin Towers, almost as if Morandi's objects were pregnant with the wounds of the most tragic event of our new century.
—-
Morandi is an assiduous reader of Pascal, whose philosophy influenced his creative process
Morandi’s flowers: using personal poetics to express a new attention to reality
Regardez-les,
ces quelques fleurs
aux couleurs éteintes.
Votre regard
va les allumer.
Le poids du silence
va vous envahir.
Le temps
s'est arrêté.
Morandi
est aussi proche
de nous
que l'éternité.
- Jean-Michel Folon
Morandi and cinema:
He is not only visual perception, investigative gaze, creative process, ability to scrutinize and frame a selected element of reality, and choice of 'format' in a painting "like the choice made by a director in the framing of a shot" since the painter knows "what to show us, what's important for him, what serves to represent his world: everything else stays out of the shot"- special qualities (as Francesco Galluzzi says in the present catalogue) that attracted directors who collected his works, such as Michelangelo Antonioni, Vittorio De Sica and Valerio Zurlini," or those like Bernardo Bertolucci and Ferzan Özpetek who found him fascinating, or those who included his works in scenes of their films, ranging from Robert Aldrich in Kiss Me Deadly (1955) to Federico Fellini in La dolce vita , Michelangelo Antonioni in La notte , and most recently Luca Guadagnino in lo sono l'amore (I am love, 2009).
( an essay on Morandi and Italian cinema is included in this book, however, despite my interest in films as well Morandi, I don’t think that essay is as good as this one)
Other quotes :
It is absoluteness, and universal art. It is evocative poetry, “the effable" spoken of by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Paul Auster's "sublime and austere realm,", the mystery contained within the irregular edges of his objects as noticed by the protagonists of Don DeLillo's novel Falling Man “the drama of perception" analysed by Siri Hustvedt.
———
He is the painter in whom the laceration between being and appearance reflects a modern restlessness, who cloaks his works in mystery and enigma, and for this reason, someone we feel closer to in our uncertain times. He is the painter in whom we can recognise ourselves.
———
Morandi in his own words:
"I believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal, than what we actually see. We know that all that we can see of the objective world, as human beings, never really exists as we see and understand it."
"I think that to express that which is in nature, that is, the visible world, is the thing that most interests me."
“I thus realized the need to follow my instincts all the way, trusting to my own strength and forgetting any stylistic preconceptions during my work.”
"I have always concentrated on a far narrower field of subject-matter than most other painters, so that the danger of repeating myself has been far greater. I think I have avoided this danger by devoting more time and thought to planning each one of my paintings as a variation on one or the other of these few themes."
“I paint and make etchings of landscapes and still lifes. The only titles I chose for these paintings were conventional, like Natura morta, Fiori, or Paesaggio [Still Life, Flowers, Landscape] without any implications of strangeness or of an unreal world…Before I die I should like to complete two pictures. The important thing is to touch the core, the essence of things.”
( essence -“being” )
( I have only finished reading the essays , even though I marked the book as “ read”. I will keep it as long as l can to spend time with the paintings. The rating is for the essays.)
Their bookmarks are also still in this heavy collection, presumably to mark the paintings that resonated with them the most.
Not many people take out art related books from my library, not even those from the artists that are household names, which means that I get to enjoy all the art books for long periods of time, without having to worry about the need of another person. However, it’s also a lonely experience, knowing that rarely anyone cares about what brings me so much comfort and spiritual consolation.
The paintings in this book that are bookmarked are not the ones I particularly admire, however, it brings me much joy to know someone probably loves the Morandi’ art as much as I do. A stranger, in my city.
Notes :
Essay : Modern Restlessness
He ( Morandi) is endless dilation. He is like the Aleph, “ a point from which one can catch sight of infinity.”
Both the director Bernardo Bertolucci and his father Attilio Bertolucci love Morandi. Attilio put Morandi together with Giotto ( facades or sides of houses that are often blank , which refer to “a common monumentality”)
B. Bertolucci:
“In Morandi, if you look carefully, you can catch a glimpse of a point from which... a bit like in one of Borges' stories called The Aleph. The Aleph is a point from which (no one knows how) you can see a huge number of other things in the world, all at the same time - and that's it, in Morandi's pictures, apparently so simple, so rigorous, there's always a place, a point from which you can catch sight of infinity, which is also the infinity of his poetry, so calm and subdued."
Morandi’s key artists:
Giotto, Masaccio, Piero, Bellini, Titian, Chardin, Corot, Renoir and Cézanne
Still life:
Objects stripped of every function they ever had, and sometimes not even recognisable, these are pure forms despoiled of every descriptive identity: images, opportunities for paint, pretexts for painting.
—-
Like an architect studying the plan of a building, Morandi defined the base of his objects by drawing their outlines in pencil on the pieces of paper on which he arranged them ; he examined their volumes, scaled their relationships in height, accentuating their monu-mentality, so that his Still Lifes were seen by contemporaries as "spires of a Gothic cathedral"or "towers that rise above the view of a city,"or, in the sensitive, anxiety-cloaked words of a great New York writer of our own time, Don DeLillo, as something akin to the Twin Towers, almost as if Morandi's objects were pregnant with the wounds of the most tragic event of our new century.
—-
Morandi is an assiduous reader of Pascal, whose philosophy influenced his creative process
Morandi’s flowers: using personal poetics to express a new attention to reality
Regardez-les,
ces quelques fleurs
aux couleurs éteintes.
Votre regard
va les allumer.
Le poids du silence
va vous envahir.
Le temps
s'est arrêté.
Morandi
est aussi proche
de nous
que l'éternité.
- Jean-Michel Folon
Morandi and cinema:
He is not only visual perception, investigative gaze, creative process, ability to scrutinize and frame a selected element of reality, and choice of 'format' in a painting "like the choice made by a director in the framing of a shot" since the painter knows "what to show us, what's important for him, what serves to represent his world: everything else stays out of the shot"- special qualities (as Francesco Galluzzi says in the present catalogue) that attracted directors who collected his works, such as Michelangelo Antonioni, Vittorio De Sica and Valerio Zurlini," or those like Bernardo Bertolucci and Ferzan Özpetek who found him fascinating, or those who included his works in scenes of their films, ranging from Robert Aldrich in Kiss Me Deadly (1955) to Federico Fellini in La dolce vita , Michelangelo Antonioni in La notte , and most recently Luca Guadagnino in lo sono l'amore (I am love, 2009).
( an essay on Morandi and Italian cinema is included in this book, however, despite my interest in films as well Morandi, I don’t think that essay is as good as this one)
Other quotes :
It is absoluteness, and universal art. It is evocative poetry, “the effable" spoken of by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Paul Auster's "sublime and austere realm,", the mystery contained within the irregular edges of his objects as noticed by the protagonists of Don DeLillo's novel Falling Man “the drama of perception" analysed by Siri Hustvedt.
———
He is the painter in whom the laceration between being and appearance reflects a modern restlessness, who cloaks his works in mystery and enigma, and for this reason, someone we feel closer to in our uncertain times. He is the painter in whom we can recognise ourselves.
———
Morandi in his own words:
"I believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal, than what we actually see. We know that all that we can see of the objective world, as human beings, never really exists as we see and understand it."
"I think that to express that which is in nature, that is, the visible world, is the thing that most interests me."
“I thus realized the need to follow my instincts all the way, trusting to my own strength and forgetting any stylistic preconceptions during my work.”
"I have always concentrated on a far narrower field of subject-matter than most other painters, so that the danger of repeating myself has been far greater. I think I have avoided this danger by devoting more time and thought to planning each one of my paintings as a variation on one or the other of these few themes."
“I paint and make etchings of landscapes and still lifes. The only titles I chose for these paintings were conventional, like Natura morta, Fiori, or Paesaggio [Still Life, Flowers, Landscape] without any implications of strangeness or of an unreal world…Before I die I should like to complete two pictures. The important thing is to touch the core, the essence of things.”
( essence -“being” )
( I have only finished reading the essays , even though I marked the book as “ read”. I will keep it as long as l can to spend time with the paintings. The rating is for the essays.)
January 22, 2009
went to ny to see this show--been waiting 20 years or more for a big Morandi show and it was worth it. Stunning. The reproductions are pretty good in this book, but some do cover two pages and that is always annoying, having to look in the crease instead of having fold outs for the larger reproductions.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews