Giorgio Morandi

Giorgio Morandi was born in Bologna on 20th July 1890. He spent almost his whole life working as a painter and etcher in a small studio-flat in Via Fondazza that he shared with his three sisters. He never had a proper atelier, but he lived and worked in a medium-size room with a window looking onto a small yard, subject of several of his paintings.

In this room there were also his bed, an old writing table, a drawing table, the easel, and all around, on narrow shelves, the arsenal of the simple things we see in his still lives: bottles, containers, vases, jugs, kitchen utensils, boxes. In this studio-sleeping room the artist spent his time to reflect, work, and rest in an uninterrupted dialogue with his own reality.

Except for trips to Venice, Florence, or Rome for exhibitions of his paintings, or for summer excursions to Grizzana on the hills of the Tuscan- Emilian Apennines, Morandi scarcely ever left Bologna. Notwithstanding his extreme reserve, his paintings came to be known and in demand throughout Europe and America. 

In 1930 he obtained “due to his fame” the professorship of Etching Techniques at the Accademia di Belle Arti of Bologna, where he taught for 26 years. As early as 1934, in a public address by Roberto Longhi, at that time Professor of Renaissance Art at the University of Bologna, Morandi was recognized as the greatest living painter in Italy.
In 1949 he was featured in the seminal exhibition of Twentieth Century Italian Art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and in 1957 he was awarded the Grand Prize for Painting at the São Paulo Biennale in Brazil. 
Morandi died in his house in Bologna in June 1964.