The remarkable Natura morta con busto di gesso is considered Morandi’s very first-still life featuring a representative style.  Renowned as one of the greatest still-life painters of the 20^thcentury, Morandi spent the course of his lifetime depicting the same familiar objects over and again with a refined sensitivity to color, tone and compositional balance.  Painted when the young artist was just completing his studies, the present work marks the beginning of a profoundly unique universe marked by majestic representations of objects, harmony of composition and exquisite tonal variations through a limited palette.  Spending his formative years at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Bolognia, Morandi became well versed in the traditional use of various artistic media as well as the long-established, academic systems of formula and composition (fig. 1).  

The interplay of light and shade, the sensation of mass and density and the carefully constructed composition of Natura morta con busto di gesso demonstrate the pictorial research the artist immersed himself into during the early years of his career. Both classical and modern styles influenced the artist, as Joan M. Lukach pointed out “The large volumetric simplified forms in Early Renaissance art , with the slow and majestic cadences of their repeated contours were more suited to his nature, though it is likely that Morandi’s appreciation of Giotto was heightened by his understanding of the work of Cezanne, Picasso, Braque, Boccioni and Russolo” (Joan M. Lukach, “Giorgio Morandi, Toward a better understanding of his art, 1910 to 1943” in Morandi, Des Moines, 1981, p.22). While he paid close attention to the artistic and stylistic developments of his contemporaries, Morandi nonetheless dedicated himself to cultivating a style that was entirely his own. The still life became his muse, and he was to go spending his entire life painting these small, timeless poetic compositions.

This work has been requested for the forthcoming exhibition, Morandi the Hereditary of the Still Life, to be held at the Musée Maillol Paris in 2014.