Biography

Giorgio Morandi was an eminent Italian artist known for his subtly colored still-life paintings of ceramic vessels. Working in both oil and watercolor, Morandi also depicted sunbaked landscapes, both from his studio window and outdoors in the Apennine hills. The artist’s paintings are often interpreted as a quiet rejection of the tumultuous modern world. “I am essentially a painter of the kind of still-life composition that communicates a sense of tranquility and privacy, moods which I have always valued above all else,” he once explained. Born on July 20, 1890 Bologna, Italy, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in his native city. Influenced by Georges Seurat and Paul Cézanne as a young man, Morandi participated his countryman’s Giorgio de Chirico’s Metaphysical Art during the 1910s. This changed around 1920, when his aesthetic began to more closely resemble the frescoes of Piero della Francesca than works of the avant-garde. Over the decades that followed, Morandi’s paintings underwent minor adjustments, yet consistently strove towards compositional balance and harmonized color. The artist died on June 18, 1964 in Bologna, Italy. In 2018, his ovular painting Natura morta (1941), broke an auction record for the artist when it sold at Christie’s for $4,332,500. Today, his works are included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Tate Gallery in London, and the Museo Morandi in Bologna, among others.