Still Life

The bond between Vitali and Morandi was born in 1927, when the Milanese collector wrote to the painter to ask him to make an etching to be published in the series “Graphica moderna,” started with Giovanni Scheiwiller and intended to spread awareness of contemporary Italian artists. The following year, the two met in Venice, where Morandi was exhibiting in the salons of the Biennale and where Vitali bought his first work, Fiori, painted in 1918.

From that moment on, the relationship between the two gradually became more intense, founded certainly on the aesthetic and critical predilection of the scholar/collector but also on a deep and mutual affection. Vitali published works that were capital for knowledge of Morandi, still unsurpassed points of reference for scholars and collectors of the Bolognese master: in 1957 the first catalog of his graphic work, in 1964 the monograph dedicated to Morandi the painter and, finally, in 1977, the general catalog of the artist, who died in 1964.

In the meantime, Vitali acquired for his collection a number of splendid oil paintings, which date over a period of about thirty years and mark some of the key passages in Morandi’s career: from the first paintings inspired by the manner of Cézanne (Landscape, 1911), to the metaphysical works and those that Morandi exhibited with the Valori Plastici group in the 1920s (Fiori, 1918; Natura morta, 1920) to the splendid and rarefied Landscape of 1941, which in Vitali’s words was “resolved in a single sitting but certainly meditated on for a long time.”