Recent history has witnessed renewed interest in the work and life of the Italian artist Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964), famous for the muted tones and graceful volumes that epitomize his intimate still-life and landscape paintings, unadorned compositions that defy association with a single artistic movement. Characterized as stubbornly solitary, Morandi filled his canvases with barren combinations of forlorn bottles, vases, and other miscellaneous containers, producing clusters of architectonic bodies that allude to cathedrals, sculptures, and even the human figure in images whose “ambiguity of figure and ground” arrest the viewer (103). The Bolognese painter’s subdued landscapes oscillate between meditative abstract floating planes that anticipate color field painting and figurative views of the plains of Grizzana, the artist’s countryside retreat. Like his hushed compositions, Morandi’s career, and especially his output during Mussolini’s ventennio, has remained enshrouded in a silence—at least politically speaking—that still characterizes much of Italian interwar art history. Indeed, the reticence of Morandi’s trademark aesthetic has spilled over into the critical discourse that surrounds his oeuvre.

Increased scholarship, museum exhibitions, and the publication of documents that focus on Morandi have simultaneously dismantled and reinforced the so-called “Morandi myth” that depicts him as an apolitical recluse or the ultimate outsider artist whose singular pictorial style and shy personality prevent his inscription into the history of modern art.¹ With little exception, Morandi literature remains rooted in a handful of sources that scrupulously catalogue his work yet lack historical documentation and critical interpretation, beginning with Lamberto Vitale’s encyclopedic Catalogo ragionato of 1964, still the fundamental starting point for any serious Morandi studies.² Recently on view at the Grand Palais in Paris, Italia Nova: Une aventure de l’art italien, 1900–1950 offers the latest chapter in isolationist Morandi scholarship with an “Homage to Giorgio Morandi. A Solitary Artist,” which asserts Morandi’s singularity as “an independent artist who stay[ed] away from the art movements of the Fascist era.”³

Within this recent flurry of activity, Janet Abramowicz’s long-awaited monograph stands out: Giorgio Morandi: The Art of Silence is an epic account covering five decades of Morandi’s life that breaks new ground in two significant ways. First, Abramowicz radically undermines the politically neutralized accounts of Morandi’s career through a meticulously documented survey of his life and work that squarely situates him within Italian artistic, cultural, and historical events stretching from the early twentieth century into the postwar period including Fascism, racial laws, German occupation, and beyond. Second, and no less significantly, Abramowicz brings her acute vision and tempered tactile sensibility as a practicing artist and art historian to bear on her readings of Morandi’s works, nostalgically narrating her experience as Morandi’s student and teaching assistant at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Bologna in the early 1950s. With personal ties to Morandi and his sisters, Abramowicz was uniquely positioned to write this intimate yet critical portrait of the artist and his milieu in an accessible volume that appreciably expands our knowledge of the art world in twentieth-century Italy as much as it recasts and complicates Morandi’s position within it. Thus, in addition to explicating Morandi’s connections to the world around him and exposing the artist’s own contributions to the “Morandi myth,” Abramowicz swiftly dismantles a second myth: that Morandi simply repainted the same still life in soft brown, taupe, and cream hues for the duration of his career, a long-standing prejudice initiated with Ardengo Soffici’s 1932 monograph. She trains her reader to see the subtle yet significant variations within Morandi’s oeuvre whose range is far more complex than is typically believed. As she elegantly illustrates, Morandi produced “fascinating series of variations on the same theme. . . . Like Bach’s fugues, these paintings, rich in subtle tonalities and infused with emotion, are much more than mere exercises in the variations and permutations of composition and tone” (205).

Breaking the critical silence that has characterized Morandi’s career since the 1920s, this book constitutes the first extended account to integrate Morandi into the greater fabric of cultural figures working in Italy from the interwar period through the 1960s. As such, this volume enriches the growing body of critical literature on visual culture under Italian Fascism by stressing the tension between national and regional priorities. Abramowicz interrogates first the Bolognese environment that witnessed his artistic birth (and engineered his initial critical rejection) and then extends her inquiry to both national and international realms by pinpointing Morandi’s interactions with and breaks from figures ranging from Soffici and Giorgio de Chirico to Mino Maccari and Leo Longanesi. The result is a richly textured tapestry that weaves together personal anecdotes, the artist’s correspondence and registrello,and publications and exhibitions through which Morandi was first exposed to French modernism; Abramowicz, with great acumen, combines this material with Morandi’s own exhibition and reception history inside Italy and abroad. As such, this book represents a monumental achievement that will have an impact not only on Morandi studies but also on the history of Italian modernism under Fascism and its place within the history of art. Abramowicz’s reconstruction of Morandi’s extensive social and professional networks is so detailed that her encyclopedic work is, though undeniably admirable, at times overwhelming as a monograph.

Eleven chronologically organized chapters examine Morandi’s ties to academic and commercial artistic groups together with the political and social circles around which policies and prejudices developed under Fascism, rendering indisputable the fact that “Morandi was a beneficiary of Fascism’s new cultural policies: he obtained better jobs, and the new state’s patronage provided him opportunities to exhibit and sell his work” (xiv). Abramowicz travels from the vexed site of Morandi’s artistic training, the Accademia di Belle Arti in Bologna, to his involvement with periodicals, eventually taking stock of his identity through his absence and presence at certain public exhibition venues—including the Venice Biennale, the Roman Quadriennale, the Premio Cremona, and the Premio Bergamo—in order to evaluate the evolution of Morandi’s reputation in light of his commercial successes and failures during the interwar and postwar periods.

The family portraits and interior snapshots of the artist’s Via Fondazza residence in chapter 1, “A World Within a Studio: Arte Povera,” transport the reader into the inner sanctum of Morandi’s creative practice. The author’s powerful prose cloaks the reader in the atmosphere of Bologna—its monuments, its climate, its light—and demonstrates how Morandi translated an urban environment into his trademark architectural still lifes while expertly situating Morandi in the history of modern Italian art. Moreover, she elucidates the enduring nature of the crisis of situating Morandi within the history of modern art and the history of Bolognese artistic production by initiating her discussion with an overview of the local politics surrounding the controversial founding of a Morandi Museum in the centro storico distinct from Bologna’s more peripheral museum of modern and contemporary art.

Chapters 2 and 3 explore Morandi’s creative development despite the artistically conservative environment of his native Bologna that rejected nearly all forms of pictorial modernism. To this end, Abramowicz investigates Morandi’s difficult student years and his first encounters with Impressionism, Cubism, and other modernist movements through Soffici’s writing (1909–14) for the Florentine journal La Voce—which likewise introduced him to figures such as Carlo Carrà and Roberto Longhi—and also through Soffici’s dramatic 1910 exhibition of French modernists in Florence. Departing from other accounts, she insists on Morandi’s etchings as essential to understanding his artistic trajectory. Abramowicz contrasts the sluggish Bolognese art world with the burgeoning enthusiasm for modernism elsewhere in Italy by delineating the birth of Futurism and Morandi’s alignment therewith at the 1914 Esposizione Futurista Internazionale at Sprovieri’s Galleria Permanente Futurista in Rome, which granted Morandi national exposure.

Chapters 4 and 5 describe the precarious period in which, despite increased popularity, Morandi continued to struggle financially in the years leading up to Fascism. Through Mario Broglio’s Valori Plastici, Abramowicz defines what “metaphysical painting” meant for de Chirico, Carrà, and Morandi, and she explains how each, influenced by Cubism and Futurism, generated “objects [that] seem to glow with an inner opalescence” (58). She stresses in particular the importance of magazines not only for Morandi’s career but for Italian modernism more generally, highlighting Valori Plastici as at once the disseminator of classically infused Italian modernism and the launch pad for Morandi on the international scene. Indeed, one of this volume’s greatest contributions is its clarification of the intricate network of periodicals—La Brigata, La Raccolta, La Ronda, and others—that played a crucial role in sustaining the art world in Italy from the end of World War I up through the birth of Fascism.

Chapters 6 and 7 decisively link Morandi’s increasing fame to the rise of Fascism. Indeed, the inventory included in the artist’s registrello “explodes the myth of his political and social isolation during the ventennio and situates Morandi clearly within the culture of Fascist Italy” (94). These most useful chapters identify for the expert and novice alike central artistic and cultural figures at work under Fascism including Roberto Farinacci, Giuseppe Bottai, and Margarita Sarfatti, who introduced Morandi to the most prominent collectors of the day. Morandi’s connections to the strapaese group, which “idealized the countryside . . . as a metaphor for the traditional and uncorrupted moral values that they sought to preserve,” and especially Mino Maccari (Il Selvaggio, 1924–43) and Leo Longanesi (L’Italiano, 1926–42), squarely aligned him with powerful Fascist intellectuals who promoted his paintings and etchings to a larger audience; “through his close friendships with Maccari and Longanesi and the Strapaese group . . . Morandi eventually found his place in the symbiotic web of artistic patronage and favors in Fascist Italy” (117). In attempting to recuperate Morandi’s local reputation in Bologna, both Maccari and Longanesi positioned him as a “pure” rather than avant-garde painter, thus erasing the impact of French art, Futurism, or the Valori Plastici artists on Morandi in the years leading up to and following World War I, thereby effectively establishing the “cherished Morandi myth” (129–30). Abramowicz connects Morandi’s improved position within Fascist cultural circles with his eventual securing of a regular teaching job at the Accademia per chiara fama—Italy’s equivalent of a target of opportunity hire—that granted him both the time and the money required to paint.

Chapter 8 interprets Morandi’s still lifes in the late 1920s and into the 1930s as pictorial analogs of the painter’s growing loneliness coincidental with Maccari and Longanesi’s departure for Rome. Illustrating the broader implications of her study, Abramowicz provides an overview of the evolving character of national exhibition venues, highlighting the increasingly political agendas of venues such as the Venice Biennale—from which Morandi was absent from 1934 to 1948—whose “bombastic rhetoric” makes obvious “why Morandi’s art has been interpreted as anti-Fascist” (139). Abramowicz shows how “unlike the Biennale, the [Roman] Quadriennale offered no prizes for works depicting Fascist-oriented subject matter” and did not require artists to be members of the party. But despite his involvement with the Quadriennale, Morandi’s still lifes were not well received, since they “were . . . so far ahead of their time” and not consistent with the inflated Fascist visual rhetoric comprising the classically inspired human figure, wartime imagery, and maternity favored at other venues, like the 1932 Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista (145). Discredited by many critics for his championing of the still life over more politically appropriate genres, Morandi nevertheless revived his career by enlisting in the Sindacato Nazionale, or Fascist printmakers’ union. And despite his absence from the Biennale in this period, Morandi’s continued involvement with the Quadriennale into the late 1930s eventually elicited positive reviews; most importantly, the Quadriennale occasioned Morandi’s meeting Roberto Longhi, chair of art history at the University of Bologna from 1935 onward, who became Morandi’s lifelong friend and supporter.

Chapter 9 continues to investigate art in light of politics, showing the coincidence of Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia with the opening of the second Quadriennale in 1935. Notwithstanding the increasingly conservative visual rhetoric circulating on the eve of World War II, Morandi won a 50,000 lire prize at the 1939 Quadriennale, a success quickly spoiled by the critical betrayal by former friends and critics through journals including Quadrivio, Emporium, and Le Arti, where Cesare Brandi published the article that he eventually expanded into his 1942 monograph on the artist. Abramowicz points out that Brandi’s text not only links Morandi to the most prominent collectors in Fascist Italy but also paints “the hermetic portrait that set the tone for the formalist view of Morandi’s art [to] be embraced . . . for decades to come.” Chapter 10, “The End of an Era: The Debacle of Fascism, 1945,” summarizes Morandi’s wartime activities and eventual retreat to Grizzana, where he remained highly productive until 1944, when the situation under German occupation became increasingly perilous.

Chapter 11 completes Abramowicz’s analysis of Morandi’s exhibition history, asserting the importance of his postwar involvement with the Venice Biennale and his increasing resistance to showing his work in Italy between 1948 and his death. Complementing her exhaustive account of Morandi’s exhibition history up through World War II, Abramowicz treats his postwar presence in the United States through MoMA’s 1949 Twentieth-century Italian Art, Lionello Venturi’s 1957 Morandi retrospective at New York’s World House Gallery, and the 1958 exhibition Painting in Post-War Italy, 1945–1957 at the Casa Italiana at Columbia University, where Morandi was cast as a modernist in the context of abstraction. Second, Abramowicz delineates Morandi’s postwar reception in Italy and abroad in light of the fact that “the fall of Fascism created a highly politicized climate for Italian art critics and artists” (194). She illustrates the impact of “historical amnesia about . . . the Fascist ventennio” on Morandi criticism, showing that the postwar Marxists (like interwar Fascists) dismissed Morandi on account of not only “his rejection of the classicizing Fascist iconography that focused mainly on the human figure, and his insistence that art should have no role in politics,” but also his “aristocratic isolation and elitism” and his lack of “appeal to the masses” (194). Her assessment captures the core of the debates within postwar historiography of the interwar period, pitting Giulio Carlo Argan’s critique of isolating Italian modernism from its Fascist associations against Brandi’s desire to “protect the integrity of Italian culture and keep it classical and pure.” Falling within the latter camp, Brandi, Longhi, and Vitali, three of Italy’s most prominent art historians in the postwar period, all put Morandi on a pedestal apart from other artists (196).

No less salient than Abramowicz’s painstakingly detailed account of Morandi’s reception history is her heightened sensitivity to the paintings and etchings themselves throughout this volume, which systematically charts the evolution of Morandi’s facture from his early, layered canvases to his later surfaces covered with thinner washes as he moved toward increasingly abstract compositions. On a practical level, the impossibility of reproducing all of the works discussed with such specificity is one of the book’s few frustrations, for Abramowicz’s incorporation of the figure numbers used in Vitali’s catalogue raisonné requires the reader to refer to that work continuously in order to supplement the volume’s more than one hundred black-and-white and color reproductions. Nevertheless, Abramowicz should receive the highest praise for daring to do what other art historians have repeatedly denied: she unabashedly links Morandi as both artist and person to his predecessors, contemporaries, and descendants, arguing that “it was in [Morandi’s] room that the real arte povera began” (9).