Giorgio Morandi: Lines of Poetry
The Estorick Collection extends show to 28 April 2013
Giorgio Morandi: Lines of Poetry has proved to be one of the most popular shows the Estorick Collection has staged in its 15-year history, with over6,000 people visiting in the first six weeks. It has therefore been decided to extend the exhibition to 28 April 2013.
Organised in collaboration with Bologna’s Galleria d’Arte Maggiore, and with loans from a number of private collections as well as from the Estorick Collection, the successful career-spanning exhibition of some eighty meditative and intimate prints, paintings and drawings by the master of poetic understatement, Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964), has also attracted much critical acclaim being described by the Financial Times as ‘…a revelatory show’ and as ‘A great exhibition can sometimes alter one’s view of an artist.Giorgio Morandi: Lines of Poetry … is such an event’ in The Observer.
One of the Estorick Collection’s most popular artists, Morandi is often presented as a somewhat reclusive figure whose works embody ‘eternal’ and ‘timeless’ artistic values, transcending the mercurial languages of modernism through their masterly compositional balance, subtle tonal range and exquisite luminosity. However, the fact that Morandi passed through the ranks of F. T. Marinetti’s Futurist movement, exhibited alongside Novecento artists such as Mario Sironi and was affiliated with Giorgio de Chirico’s Scuola metafisica, reveals him to have been a far more complex and multi-layered figure than might be supposed on first acquaintance with his ostensibly uncomplicated still lifes and landscapes. As de Chirico noted, Morandi was a master of uncovering the ‘metaphysical dimensions of the commonest objects’, that is, of discerning the poetry within ‘those things that habit has rendered so familiar to us that we […] often look upon them with the eye of one who sees but does not understand.’
