Milan, major exhibition dedicated to Giorgio Morandi opens at Palazzo Reale, with important loans also international

Opening Oct. 5, 2023 on the piano nobile of Milan’s Palazzo Reale and open until Feb. 4, 2024, is the major exhibition Morandi 1890 - 1964, conceived and curated by Maria Cristina Bandera, art historian and specialist Morandi scholar, promoted by the Municipality of Milan-Culture and produced by Palazzo Reale, Civita Mostre and 24 ORE Cultura-Gruppo 24 ORE Museums, in collaboration with Settore Musei Civici Bologna | Museo Morandi, and realized thanks to Unipol Group, main sponsor, and Bper banca, exhibition sponsor. Finestre Sull’Arte is media partner.

The exhibition that Milan dedicates to Giorgio Morandi (Bologna, 1890 - 1964), one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century, with the intention of celebrating the elective relationship between the city and the Bolognese painter more than thirty years after the last exhibition, presents to the public about one hundred and twenty works thanks to loans from important public institutions and prestigious private collections, in particular from the Museo Morandi | Settore Musei Civici Bologna and Milanese collections - Pinacoteca di Brera, Museo Novecento, Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Casa Museo Boschi di Stefano, Villa Necchi Campiglio-FAI Fondo Ambiente Italiano-, joined by Mart in Rovereto, GAM in Turin, Palazzo Pitti, Museo del Novecento in Florence, Pinacoteca Nazionale in Siena, Galleria d’Modern Art in Roma Capitale, the Roberto Longhi Foundation in Florence, the Magnani-Rocca Foundation in Mamiano di Traversetolo, the Domus Foundation in Verona, the Giorgio Cini Foundation and the Carraro Foundation in Venice. It also counts international loans from the Vatican Museums, the Musée Jenisch in Vevey and the public collections of Winterthur and Siegen, cities where Morandi exhibited while still alive in 1957 and 1962, receiving the prestigious Rubenspreis from the German city. Loans from public institutions included the Chamber of Deputies, Eni, Telecom and Rai.

Lombard or living in Milan were Morandi’s first great collectors, such as Vitali, Feroldi, Scheiwiller, Valdameri, De Angeli, Jesi, Jucker, Boschi Di Stefano, and Vismara, part of whose collections were donated to the city, and Milanese was the Galleria del Milione, with which the painter had a privileged relationship.

Through the works on display, visitors will be able to trace the artist’s entire career: fifty years of activity, from 1913 to 1963. In terms of the extent and quality of the works on display, the exhibition aims to be among the most important and comprehensive retrospectives on the Bolognese painter held in recent decades.

The exhibition itinerary, divided into thirty-four sections, follows a chronological criterion with targeted and unprecedented juxtapositions intended to document the stylistic evolution and modus operandi of the Bolognese painter, in the variation of the chosen themes, such as still life, landscape, flowers and only rarely figures, as well as techniques such as painting, etching and watercolor. Halfway through, the public will find avideo installation, created in collaboration with the Morandi Museum of Bologna’s Civic Museums Sector, which aims to re-propose the room-studio in Via Fondazza in Bologna, now a museum, where Morandi lived and worked until his last days, enhanced by audio fragments of a 1955 radio interview by Peppino Mangravite, a teacher at Columbia University, with the painter.

The exhibition opens with 1913 and the avant-garde masterpieces, a personal assimilation of the new Cubist spatiality along the Giotto-Cézanne trajectory, and concludes in 1963, with rarefied painting taken to the extreme of formal verisimilitude. Beginning with the first contact with the avant-garde, between Cézannism, Cubism and Futurism (1913-1918, sections 1-3), the exhibition presents the painter’s approach to metaphysics (1918-1919, section 4), the return to reality and tradition (1919-1920, sections 5-6), the experiments of the 1920s (1921-1929, sections 7-10), etching and the conquest of tonal painting (1928-1929, section 11). It then continues by analyzing the maturation of a language between constructive and tonal sense and the variation of themes in the 1930s (1932-1939, section 12), the 1940s (1940-1949, sections 13- 20) and the 1950s, leading to a gradual simplification (1950-1959, sections 21-28). Section 29 is devoted to watercolor (1956-1963) and finally sections 30 to 34 are devoted to the tension between abstraction and reality in the last years (1960-1963), in which the essence of reality, the substance of a lifelong quest, is addressed.

Morandi’s entire experience develops between two poles: an early confrontation with international artistic novelties and the formulation of a language still capable of translating the anxieties of modernity.

Among the works on display are Still Life of 1918 from the Pinacoteca di Brera, Still Life of 1923-1924 from the Museo Novecento in Florence, Still Life of 1936 from the Fondazione Magnani-Rocca, Landscape of 1935 from the GAM in Turin, Flowers of 1951 from the Fondazione Roberto Longhi in Florence, Still Life of 1952 from the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Milan, Still Life of 1956 from the Museo Morandi in Bologna, Still Life of 1955 from the Kunst Museum Winterthur, Still Life of 1957 from the Muséand Jenisch, Fondation pour les Arts et les Lettres in Vevey, Still Life of 1962 from the Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Siegen, Still Life of 1960 from the Mart in Rovereto.

"Intense and decisive, in countless respects, was Giorgio Morandi’s relationship with Milan since 1930, when the City of Milan, the first public body ever, purchased at the 17th Venice Biennale a Natura morta, now at the Museo del Novecento. The first recognition by official critics, that of Roberto Longhi in 1934, was still to come, since, before then, artists and literati had dealt with the painter from Via Fondazza. It was in Milan that the first monograph on Morandi, that of Arnaldo Beccaria, was published by Hoepli in 1939, and Milanese were the first enamored collectors whose works would enrich, in significant numbers because of that patronage that is one of the most characteristic features of the Milanese identity, the Milanese public collections. One cannot be silent, moreover, about the promotional work carried out by numerous Milanese galleries, first and foremost that of Gino and Peppino Ghiringhelli’s Il Milione. So decisive was Morandi’s Milanese affair that in 1990 an exhibition appropriately titled Morandi and Milan was held at the Palazzo Reale, at the behest of the City of Milan, in which the special predilection of the Milanese cultural and business milieu for Morandi was documented," said Domenico Piraina, director of the Palazzo Reale in Milan. “Given these brief premises,” he added, “it was almost necessarily necessary, in the framework of the initiatives that Palazzo Reale devotes to Italian art of the 20th century and that already includes significant chapters such as the one on Boccioni, de Chirico, Carrà and magic realism - to which must be added the equally decisive reviews on de Pisis and Sironi held in theadjacent Museo del Novecento -, the reinterpretation of Morandi’s work and its re-proposition to new generations, convinced, in the wake of the wish that Roberto Longhi formulated on the occasion of Morandi’s death, that his artistic stature would grow with the passage of time.”

The exhibition is accompanied by the Giorgio Morandi catalog, published by 24 Ore Cultura, which includes an extensive essay by Maria Cristina Bandera entitled Morandi yesterday and today, followed by essays by other scholars focusing on the painter’s conspicuous network of relationships with art historiansart historians (Roberto Longhi, Cesare Brandi, Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, Francesco Arcangeli) and collectors (Luigi Magnani, Pietro Rollino, Francesco Paolo Ingrao, Emilio Jesi and Lamberto Vitali, curator of the general catalog of his graphic and pictorial work), with a focus on his collecting affairs, etching and iconographic fortune in cinema.

On the occasion of the exhibition, 24 ORE Cultura has published in addition to the catalog, as an exhibition guide, two volumes dedicated to the master: Giorgio Morandi, edited by Maria Cristina Bandera, for the series Una vita per l’arte, and Maicol & Mirco’s graphic novel Natura Morta. A Question to Giorgio Morandi. The volumes are available inside the exhibition bookshop, in bookstores and online.

For info and reservations: palazzorealemilano.it; mostramorandi.it

Hours: Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.; Thursday from 10 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. Closed Mondays. Last admission one hour before closing.

Tickets: Full 15 euros, reduced 13 euros for groups of at least 15 people, visitors aged 6 to 26, visitors over 65, Fai and Touring Club cardholders, ticket holders participating in the “Monday Museums” initiative (Poldi Pezzoli / Museo Teatrale alla Scala), military personnel, law enforcement officers not on duty, teachers, other concessionary categories. Reduced agreement 10 euros for students up to 25 years old, Musei Lombardia season ticket holders and Orticola members with a valid card for the current year, disabled people with less than 100 percent disability. Free for children under 6 years of age; disabled persons with 100% disability, 1 chaperone per disabled person presenting a need; 1 chaperone per group; 2 chaperones per school group; 1 chaperone and 1 guide per FAI or Touring Club group; employees of the Soprintendenza ai Beni Architettonici di Milano; ICOM card-carrying members; tour guides (upon presentation of professional qualification card); members of the Vigilance Commission and Fire Brigade (upon presentation of appropriate, unnamed card); journalists accredited by the exhibition press office (upon presentation of header and date of visit).

Image: Giorgio Morandi, Still Life (1956; oil on canvas; Bologna, Museo Morandi | Settore Musei Civici Bologna) © Giorgio Morandi, by SIAE 2023

Milan, major exhibition dedicated to Giorgio Morandi opens at Palazzo Reale, with important loans also international

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