Giorgio Morandi

December 22, 2011 7:13 PM

Aspirants to the role of painter-as-poet are many. Giorgio Morandi was the real thing.

Morandi has never been a popular artist and never will be. He engages the world one solitary viewer at a time. The experience of his work is unsharable even, in a way, with oneself, like a word remembered but not remembered, on the tip of the tongue.

posted by Trurl (5 comments total)

I knew of Morandi and like him a lot, but I never understood "painter-as-poet" is supposed to mean.
posted by cmoj at 7:21 PM on December 22, 2011

One of the best.
posted by R. Mutt at 7:29 PM on December 22, 2011

Thanks for this post. Morandi is someone I discovered slowly over time and on the very few occasions i have seen one of his works, most specifically the last time, they make me want to look at them more and more. There's that odd quietness to them that someone like Chardin, or most famously Vermeer, had. It's something painting does very well when the painter is as skilled as Morandi was.
posted by Phlegmco(tm) at 10:09 PM on December 22, 2011

One of my favourites too. Thanks.
posted by Cuke at 5:07 AM on December 23, 2011

I saw the Morandi show in New York a few years back--a stunning experience. I'd always liked the Morandis that I'd come across individually before, but seeing them en masse you really begin to understand what he was getting at. I think he's one of the greatest artists of the C20th.
posted by yoink at 9:58 AM on December 23, 2011 [1 favorite]