Giorgio Morandi is a painter's painter. Well, actually most of the printmakers claim him, too. The easy answer to Who is Giorgio Morandi? is that he is the foremost master of modern etching in the world. The real answer is more complex. He isn't known for his political statements or radical subject matter. He lived in the same family studio in Bologna all his life, rarely left Italy, and painted the same set of ordinary objects--vases, pitchers, boxes, shells, and other ordinary objects. In fact, you can see some of the very same objects in paintings ranging from the 1910s to the 1960s. Some people thought of him as a sort of saint or monk. But he wasn't a total isolate. He was in touch with the modernist painting movements of his time, and his influences range from Piero della Francesca to Cezanne and Giorgio di Chirico. He simply focused on the internal aspects of painting, limiting his narrative, his subject matter, even his palette, to focus on teasing the composition, paint treatment, and the edges of his paintings. His most famous quote is, "Nothing is more abstract than reality."
The current exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum is the first comprehensive Morandi show in the United States.
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