Still Life

In the Jesi collection, Giorgio Morandi is represented by an extraordinary series of landscapes and still lifes and by a rare Self-Portrait, a sort of anthology of masterpieces that documents the successive stages in the painter’s original line of research.

An unusual figure, that of a solitary artist who never left the city of his birth and – with rare exceptions – only knew the work of his contemporaries from books, Morandi pursued over the entire course of his existence a highly personal poetics focused on a few, humble subjects and characterized by intellectual speculation, extreme purity of expression and absolute rigor of form. He kept at a distance from the revolutionary clangor of the avant-gardes and yet was drawn in a wholly personal way by the ideas coming out of Futurism, Metaphysical Art, Valori Plastici and the Novecento currents. Around 1918, the reproductions published by the Bolognese magazine La Raccolta drew Morandi’s attention to the Metaphysical research of de Chirico and Carrà.

From the twenties onward, Morandi devoted himself exclusively to investigating the relations between objects, studying the connections between space and volumes and the shifts of light in the landscape: a line of research that is documented here by the Still Life of 1921, which recalls Corot and Chardin, the Self-Portrait of 1924 and The Pink House of 1925, as well as by the splendid Still Life with Round Table, a work “peopled not by things but by the ghosts of things” in Lamberto Vitali’s celebrated description, and the Still Life signed and dated 1929, purchased by Emilio Jesi directly from the artist.