Giorgio Morandi

P. Rollino, Rome

Private Collection, Rome

Acquired from the above

Venice, Venice Biennale, 1954

São Paolo, Museu de Arte Moderna, IV Bienal, 1957, illustrated fig. 27

Lamberto Vitali, Morandi, Catalogo Generale, vol. 2, Milan, 1977, no. 976, illustrated n.p.

Lamberto Vitali, Morandi, Catalogo Generale, vol. 2, Milan, 1994, no. 976, illustrated n.p.

This painting is in excellent condition. Original canvas. Pigments are intact. Surface is fresh and lively. There is a one-inch slight tenting in the canvas about two inches from the extreme left edge. Under UV light no inpainting is apparent.
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Natura morta is a brilliant example of Morandi's mastery of the still-life, and of the virtuosity with which he combined the simplest forms and a nearly monochrome palette into a perfectly balanced composition. The theme of still-life, which remained central to Morandi's art throughout his career, was always guided by his concern to bring together space, light, color and form, and his great achievement was to reconcile this traditional genre with the abstract aesthetic of his own time. Focusing his artistic efforts on a limited range of subjects, he was able to perfect these pictorial concerns to their purest expression.

Morandi's oeuvre introduces us to a world where silence reigns and time is suspended. There is an overwhelming universality to his work: these bottles, pitchers and jars are containers that have been used since time began. Marilena Pasquali has argued that 'time in Morandi is a primary, ineluctable dimension: it is duration, first and foremost, and then invention, gamble, daring. In the reality of phenomena, he seeks the lasting, the unchanging, the illusion of an immobile time. Change, continuous and unstoppable, is in him knowingly as he reflects himself in the object in his studio, making them each time different because it is he, instant by instant, who is different and thus sees what is in front of him with new eyes' (quoted in Giorgio Morandi, Through Light (exhibition catalogue), Imago Art Gallery, London, 2009, p. 22).