Giorgio Morandi played a key role in Italian Novecento painting. Maintaining loyalty to a genre as apparently outdated still life, he succeeded in wielding it knowingly, variously and refinedly enough to win the acclaim of the critics and the favour of the Italian and international market.
In addition to still-lifes, he nourished a passion for the landscape he observed outside the door of his beloved house in the Apennines near Bologna in the village renamed Grizzana Morandi in his honour. Morandi took part in all the art movements and trends of his day: after a brief infatuation with Futurism, he embraced Metaphysical Painting before joining the Valori Plastici magazine group in the 1920s. From 1930 to 1956, he taught engraving at the Bologna Fine Arts Academy.
Two works displayed in the rooms dedicated to the Foundation at Ca’ Pesaro represent the still life genre very well: the vases, bottles, glasses, and jugs taken as subjects arouse admiration for the level of the artist’s stylistic evolution from his sobriety and decisiveness of 1943 to the lighter, lengthened view he took in 1957.
