Morandi: Master of Modern Still Life

Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) built his visual lexicon from the most minimal of props--dust-covered bottles, bowls, vases, pitchers, tins and boxes. From it, he composed delicious permutations of quiet still lifes, in the most muted yet luminous of palettes, transforming the genre of still life into a cosmos. The composer Morton Feldman once wrote that in his own work he was "interested in getting to Time in its unstructured existence... How Time exists before we put our paws on it," and in this sense Morandi may be his counterpart in paint: his painted objects seem to possess a subtle self-sufficiency and interiority. Accompanying a recent exhibition at the Phillips Collection, Washington D.C., this beautifully designed catalogue contains a selection of reproductions buttressed with two essays by Morandi experts: Flavio Fergonzi appraises the myths that have attached to Morandi, the history of his critical reception and the cities with which the artist was particularly associated; Elisabetta Barisoni discusses Morandi's reception in America.