Unraveling the Enigma of Giorgio Morandi: A Psychoanalytic Strategy

In the fifty years since his death, the art of Italian painter Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) has become renowned throughout the world. The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brussels Centre for Fine Arts both recently honored him with major retrospectives, and two of his paintings hang in the White House. However, as a man, Morandi remains an enigma. He was a well-liked participant in the Italian art community, socializing with collectors, dealers, critics, and curators, as well as other artists. And yet he was widely considered a near recluse, referred to as “the monk Morandi in his cell” or as “the Bolognese hermit.” Biographers cite both aspects of his behavior, but do not explain the inconsistency. In this paper I will try to unravel the enigma of Morandi with a psychoanalytic strategy, an approach that focuses not simply on his behavior, but on his inner life, as revealed to us in his creative process and in the testimony of his art.

From the beginning of his career, Morandi's art was directed inward, toward capturing his own artistic vision. By age nineteen, Morandi had become an award-winning draftsman and figurative painter at the Fine Arts Academy in Bologna, home of Europe's oldest university. But even before he graduated, he had grown scornful of the academic style and begun to create small still life and landscape paintings so subtle that he was known for decades as an “artist's artist.” He distanced himself not only from his teachers' traditional approach, but also from the efforts of other young artists to form “movements” aimed at promoting the radically new.