Giorgio Morandi Spent 40 Years Painting the Same Bottles, and the World Caught Up

Giorgio Morandi

Photo: AnonymousUnknown author / Imagno / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	July 20, 1890 Bologna
Died	June 18, 1964 (73)
Occupation	Painter
Awards	Rubenspreis

In the room on Via Fondazza where Giorgio Morandi slept and painted, the models were bottles, boxes, jugs and a few vases, some with their labels scraped off and their glass painted over so it would stop throwing light back at him. He set them on a table, moved one a finger’s width, looked, and painted again. The pictures that came out of that room are small and built from grey, cream and ochre, so quiet that a hurried eye slides straight past them. Patient eyes stop. Philip Guston and Wayne Thiebaud kept returning to him, and the canvases are now crossing the world faster than their maker ever did.

What the work argues is that looking is never finished. Morandi proved it for four decades from inside a life that barely moved. He painted a tabletop, then the hills around one village in the Apennines, and stayed with both until they gave something up. The stillness is real. It was also manufactured, and the life around it was less sealed off than the legend of the hermit of Bologna likes to admit.

Bologna is where it began and where it ended. Morandi, the eldest of five children of Andrea Morandi and Maria Maccaferri, was born in the city on 20 July 1890. When his father died in 1909, the family settled at Via Fondazza 36 and the 19-year-old became head of the household. He never married. For the rest of his life he shared that apartment with his mother and his three sisters, Anna, Dina and Maria Teresa, all of them teachers and none of them married either.

At the Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna, between 1907 and 1913, he learned etching the long way, teaching himself from books about Rembrandt. A trip to Florence in 1910 put Giotto, Masaccio, Paolo Uccello and Piero della Francesca in front of him. In 1914 he flirted with Futurism, showing at the First Free Futurist Exhibition in Rome, and took a job teaching drawing in Bologna’s elementary schools that he kept until 1929. Drafted in 1915, he broke down and was discharged.

Between 1918 and 1922 he worked inside pittura metafisica, the mode of Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà, appearing in Mario Broglio’s magazine Valori Plastici and exhibiting with de Chirico, Carrà and Arturo Martini at the Fiorentina Primaverile in 1922. It was the last time he changed course. The mannequins and stage props fell away, and what remained was the thing he never let go of: a handful of ordinary objects pressed together in a haze of light, with the intervals between them doing as much work as the objects.

The hermit story has a hole in it. Through the late 1920s his etchings were championed by Il Selvaggio, Mino Maccari’s magazine of Strapaese, the rural, provincial current of fascist culture, which printed two dozen of them between 1926 and 1938. In a short autobiographical note in 1928 Morandi paid homage to fascism as the force renewing Italian art. In January 1930 he was handed the chair of etching at the Bologna academy by direct appointment, pushed through against academic resistance by Maccari, Leo Longanesi and Giuseppe Bottai, then minister of corporations, and hailed as a victory for Strapaese. None of that fits the postwar portrait of Morandi as one of the few Italian painters untouched by the regime, an artist of pure pictorial values ready-made for the modernist canon. The record cuts the other way too. On 23 May 1943 the fascist police arrested him for his friendships with Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti and Cesare Gnudi of the clandestine Partito d’Azione, and he spent a week in Bologna’s San Giovanni in Monte prison before Roberto Longhi and, once again, Maccari got him out. The truthful version is a careful man who took what the system offered a painter and kept every trace of its rhetoric off his canvases. The bottles never saluted anyone. Their painter was more pragmatic.

Longhi had already made his case in public. In his inaugural lecture in Bologna in 1934 he called Morandi one of the best living painters in Italy. During the war Morandi and his sisters sheltered in Grizzana, the hill village where the family had first summered in 1913, and the haylofts of the Fienili del Campiaro entered his landscapes. Recognition arrived late and all at once. The first postwar Venice Biennale, in 1948, gave him its first prize for an Italian painter. In 1956, the year he retired from teaching, he obtained a passport for his first trip abroad, to Winterthur, for a solo exhibition and for Chardin and Cézanne in the Oskar Reinhart collection. The São Paulo Biennial awarded him its grand prize for painting in 1957, and Siegen gave him the Rubens Prize in 1962.

He died of lung cancer in Bologna on 18 June 1964 and is buried at the Certosa with his sisters, under a portrait by his friend Giacomo Manzù. Maria Teresa, the youngest, gave his works and studio to the city, which opened the Museo Morandi in 1993; in 1985 Grizzana had already added his name to its own and became Grizzana Morandi.

The afterlife travelled further than the man. Federico Fellini hung a Morandi still life in the apartment of the doomed intellectual Steiner in La dolce vita, and Michelangelo Antonioni used his paintings in La notte. In China his name has come loose from the pictures entirely: after the 2018 palace drama Story of Yanxi Palace was praised for its muted costumes and sets, “Morandi colours” became a search term on Xiaohongshu and Douyin, attached to wallpaper, cars and nail polish. A painter who spent his life refusing decoration now names a decorating trend.

The paintings are catching up. Since June the Museum of Art Pudong in Shanghai has shown more than 120 works from 39 lenders, organised with the Museo Morandi. SFMOMA opens RM x SFMOMA: Between You and Me today, 3 October, built from the collection of BTS’s RM, in which Morandi’s Fiori of 1949 shares a room with To Sangbong’s Forsythia; it runs until 7 February 2027. In Paris, Galleria d’Arte Maggiore opens Un lieu de l’infini on 6 October, and from 21 November about 80 originals, along with the bottles and vases he painted, go on show at The Hyundai Seoul until 1 March 2027.

The work still argues what it argued on that table in Via Fondazza: that attention held long enough becomes its own subject. Sixty-two years after his death, the bottles are travelling further than he ever did.

Tags: art, artists, painters, Giorgio Morandi, Italian art, Federico Fellini

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