Giorgio Morandi - Legacy

Legacy

Throughout his career, Morandi concentrated almost exclusively on still lifes and landscapes, except for a few self-portraits. With great sensitivity to tone, color, and compositional balance, he would depict the same familiar bottles and vases again and again in paintings notable for their simplicity of execution. A prolific painter, he completed some 1350 oil paintings. He also executed 133 etchings, a significant body of work in its own right, and his drawings and watercolors often approach abstraction in their economy of means. He explained: "What interests me most is expressing what’s in nature, in the visible world, that is"; he also said, "Nothing is more abstract than reality".

Morandi was perceived as one of the few Italian artists of his generation to have escaped the taint of Fascism, and to have evolved a style of pure pictorial values congenial to modernist abstraction. Through his simple and repetitive motifs and economical use of color, value and surface, Morandi became a prescient and important forerunner of Minimalism.

Morandi is buried at Certosa cemetery in Bologna in the family tomb together with his three sisters. On his tomb there is a portrait of him donated by his friend Giacomo Manzu. In 1992, Palazzo D'Accursio in Bologna created the Giorgio Morandi museum, thanks to the donation made by his sister Maria Teresa Morandi of his works and also the atelier of the artist which were family belongings.

He has been written about by Philippe Jaccottet, Jean Leymarie, Jean Clair, Yves Bonnefoy, Roberto Longhi, Francesco Arcangeli, Cesare Brandi, Lambeto Vitali, Luigi Magnani, Marilena Pasquali and many other critics.

Federico Fellini paid tribute to him in his film La Dolce Vita, which featured Morandi's paintings, as does La notte by Michelangelo Antonioni. One of the main characters in Sarah Hall's novel How to Paint a Dead Man is loosely based on Morandi. Don DeLillo's 9/11 novel "Falling Man" (2007) includes two Morandi still-life paintings on the wall of Nina's New York apartment. Morandi was a particular favourite of eccentic Scottish poet Ivor Cutler, who included a poem about the painter in his 1973 anthology Many Flies Have Feathers.

Two oil paintings by Morandi were chosen by the President of the United States Barack Obama in 2009 and are now part of the White House collection.

Today, there is a museum dedicated to the display of Morandi's work, including a reconstruction of his studio, in Bologna.