Listen to the audio version of the article
The enchantment of things. Morandi was able to look at the world from a room and told us a story, his own. In Milan, on the Piano Nobile of Palazzo Reale, the exhibition “Morandi 1890 – 1964” conceived and curated by Maria Cristina Bandera; from today until 4 February 2024 (catalogue published by 24 Ore Cultura).
Coherent and rigorous, Morandi’s universe seems to be limited to still lifes of bottles, cups and some landscape themes, almost always the same; yet the poetics, especially in the use of tones and spaces, is always new. In his canvases, objects that share our daily life to which Morandi gives a soul. The first great collectors of Morandi lived in Milan and Lombardy, such as Vitali, Feroldi, Scheiwiller, Valdameri, De Angeli, Jesi, Jucker, Boschi Di Stefano, Vismara – part of whose collections were donated to the city – and the Galleria del Milione with whom the painter had a privileged relationship, for these Milan pays homage to Giorgio Morandi.
120 works retrace the painter’s entire artistic career: from 1913 to 1963 – through loans from important public institutions and private collections.
In Morandi’s studio
The exhibition itinerary follows a chronological criterion with targeted and original combinations that document the stylistic evolution and modus operandi of the painter, in the variation of the chosen motifs – still life, landscape, flowers and only rarely figures – and of the techniques – painting, etching and watercolor. A video installation located halfway through, created in collaboration with the Morandi Museum of the Bologna Civic Museums Sector, presents the visitor with the room-study in Via Fondazza in Bologna, now a museum, where Morandi lived and worked until his last days; in the background audio fragments of a radio interview with the painter Peppino Mangravite.
The exhibition opens with 1913 and the avant-garde masterpieces, a personal assimilation of the innovative cubist spatiality along the Giotto-Cézanne trajectory, a journey up to 1963, with a rarefied painting, taken to the extreme of formal verisimilitude, according to the famous postulate Morandiano: «I believe that there is nothing more surreal, nothing more abstract than reality».