Giorgio Morandi in New York, Fall 2008

In conjunction with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Italian Cultural Institute is proud to pay homage to the famous Bolognese artist, Giorgio Morandi in its upcoming exhibition “Giorgio Morandi Watercolors and Drawings, 1920-1963”, which will showcase a wide selection of water colors and drawings from this 20th Century master.
As I have written various times in my essays on Morandi, what matters most in his paintings, and even more so in his drawings, are the blank spaces of the still-lives and landscapes. Between the forms that penetrate each other and the forms that penetrate the audience’s consciousness is what I call “the soul’s breath”. The painter achieves this through a meticulous and unshakeable will to experiment but, as he states in his autobiography there is also a great deal of room for instinct: we are forced to “trust in its forces and forget at the moment of creation any stylistic preconceptions. “To my eyes, these drawings are enchanting; they are ideas that become traces, thoughts that find their first concrete form. Poetry shifts from the oral to the written: you can almost hear the pauses and the sighs.
As Director of the Italian Cultural Institute and co-curator of the exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, I wish to express my heartfelt thanks to all those who have assisted me in the difficult task of making this wonderful exhibition possible. Not wanting to deprive the Morandi Museum of its drawings, I selected pieces from more obscure sources: the Estorick Collection of London, the only private museum outside of Italy dedicated the spread of Italian Culture, and some collectors who have generously agreed to share their treasures. I also hope to make scholars happy by bringing together past American articles and excerpts on Morandi, an artist who has so long been absent from the New York scene,