21 Facts About Giorgio Morandi

Giorgio Morandi lived first on Via Lame where his brother Giuseppe and his sister Anna were born.

At the Accademia, which based its traditions on 14th-century painting, Giorgio Morandi taught himself to etch by studying books on Rembrandt.

Giorgio Morandi was excellent at his studies, although his professors disapproved of the changes in his style during his final two years at the Accademia.

Giorgio Morandi had a brief digression into a Futurist style in 1914.

Giorgio Morandi was influenced by the works of Cezanne, Derain, and Picasso.

Giorgio Morandi practiced metaphysical painting from 1918 to 1922.

Giorgio Morandi showed in the Novecento Italiano exhibitions of 1926 and 1929, but was more specifically associated with the regional Strapaese group by the end of the decade, a fascist-influenced group emphasizing local cultural traditions.

Giorgio Morandi was sympathetic to the Fascist party in the 1920s, although his friendships with anti-Fascist figures led authorities to arrest him briefly in 1943.

From 1928, Giorgio Morandi exhibited his work in Italy and abroad.

From 1930 to 1956, Giorgio Morandi was a professor of etching at Accademia di Belle Arti.

Giorgio Morandi visited Paris for the first time in 1956, and in 1957 he won the grand prize at the Sao Paulo Art Biennial.

Giorgio Morandi died of lung cancer on June 18,1964 at age 73.

Giorgio Morandi is buried in the Certosa di Bologna in the family tomb, together with his three sisters.

Giorgio Morandi executed 133 etchings, which constitute a significant body of work in their own right, and drawings and watercolours which approach abstraction in their economy of means.

Giorgio Morandi was perceived as one of the few Italian artists of his generation to have escaped the taint of fascism, and to have evolved a style of pure pictorial values congenial to modernist abstraction.

Giorgio Morandi was a particular favorite of the eccentric Scottish poet Ivor Cutler, who included a poem about the painter in his first anthology Many Flies Have Feathers.

The largest public collection of Giorgio Morandi's work exists at the, a branch of the Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna founded in 1993 by Franco Solmi and the municipality of Bologna.

Lesser collections of Giorgio Morandi's work are owned by major museums around the world, including the Louvre; the Musee d'Orsay; the Tate Modern; the Hermitage Museum; the National Museum of Art, Osaka; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and the National Gallery of Art, from which two Giorgio Morandi paintings were chosen by President Barack Obama for inclusion in the White House Collection.

In 2008, a retrospective of Giorgio Morandi's career including over 100 works was held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

In 2013, a Giorgio Morandi exhibition was held at the Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels, Belgium.

In 2018, a rare oval-shaped Giorgio Morandi painting from the collection of David Rockefeller sold at Christie's in New York for US$4.3 million, setting a record for the artist.