Where and when
On Wednesday 15 May the director of the Roberto Longhi Foundation, curator with Sergio Risaliti of the current exhibition at the Museo Novecento, will accompany the public along the exhibition itinerary
A very special “guide” to enter Giorgio Morandi’s universe. Wednesday 15 May at 6 pm Maria Cristina Bandera, scholar, director of the Roberto Longhi Foundation for Art History Studies and one of the leading experts in Morandi’s work, will accompany the public of the Novecento Museum to discover the works of the Bolognese master. Bandera, curator of the Exit Morandi exhibition together with the Director Sergio Risaliti, will hold a traveling conference along the exhibition path (free admission, limited places) during which he will illustrate the genesis of the exhibition and the works on display, many of which arrived at the Museo Novecento thanks to the collaboration with the Roberto Longhi Foundation and Villa Brandi and the loans of the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome, the Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena and significant private collections.
The exhibition originates from four important paintings kept at the Museo Novecento that belonged to Alberto Della Ragione, including a watercolor with a rare female figure bearing the exact date “April 11 918”, a small masterpiece on paper, which reveals the extraordinary ability of updating the artist on the avant-garde and his personal figurative synthesis, carried out in an already essential and unconventional language. Morandi’s greatness was immediately evident to Roberto Longhi, who will never interrupt the human and intellectual confrontation with the artist. The two, although dating for decades, will always give each other “her” in their correspondence; an affinity between an art historian and a painter that began at the end of 1934, on the occasion of the inaugural address given by Longhi as the new holder of the chair of Art History at the University of Bologna. In “a very crowded classroom” Longhi concluded his enlightened revision of the Moments of Bolognese painting speaking in these terms of Morandi: “And I end up finding it not entirely by chance that one of the best living painters in Italy, Giorgio Morandi, still today , while navigating among the most perilous shoals of modern painting, he nevertheless always knew how to orient his journey with a meditated slowness, with an affectionate studiousness, from the opinion of those of a new set out”.
A journey of which Cesare Brandi, Francesco Arcangeli and Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti were also vigorous interpreters, or the cardinal points of twentieth-century criticism relating to the art of the Bolognese master. Hence the foundations of a special exhibition project, which collects works that belonged or gravitated to the orbit of the four illustrious art historians, to seal, in the passage of time and in the changing of the seasons, the fidelity towards the silent and steady painting of Morandi.
On display still lifes, landscapes, flowers and a series of engravings, an artistic expression that sees Morandi as one of the greatest representatives of his years and which earned him the international prize at the São Paulo Biennial in Brazil in 1953.
Giorgio Morandi
Bologna 1890 – 1964
Immediately showing a talent for painting, he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna. Updated on the experiments of Cézanne and Derain and on the lessons of Corot and Chardin, thanks to a trip to Florence he confronts himself directly with the great masters of Italian painting, admiring, among others, the masterpieces of Giotto and Masaccio, which exert a strong influence on his later research. After the first and lightning-fast collective exhibition, dating back to 1914, he approaches with a personal poetics to metaphysical painting and the Valori Plastici movement, formed around the homonymous magazine published by Mario Broglio between 1918 and 1921. The scanning and brightness of the landscapes and still lifes of the 1920s, mindful of the “perspective synthesis of form and color” by Piero della Francesca, give way to a constant research that will continue until the last of his days in works that, albeit in an apparent immobility , reveal the feeling of the ineluctable passage of time.