Spain – Giorgio Morandi and the Old Masters
The exhibition A Backward Glance. Giorgio Morandi and the Old Masters was inaugurated at the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum on April 11, 2019.
The exhibition is curated by Petra Joos, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, in collaboration with Giovanni Casini, and in consultation with Vivien Greene, Senior Curator of 19th- and Early 20th-Century Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
The Museo Morandi of Bologna co-operates with fifteen works by Giorgio Morandi: eight paintings -six still lifes and two flowers- and seven still lifes realized as etching.
In addition, five works by Old Masters belonging to Morandi’s private collection, usually stored in Casa Morandi Museum in Bologna, via Fondazza 36: canvas by Giuseppe Maria Crespi, Pietro Longhi, and Jacopo Bassano.
The exhibition explores the relationships between Morandi’s still lifes and some of his main art historical sources and the Old Master canvases he admired, such as El Greco’s flowers; Zurbarán’s use of light to evince form; the humble details in the compositions of Crespi; and Chardin’s houses of cards.
Each of the three galleries of the exhibition creates a dialogue between Morandi’s paintings and specific Old Master works and highlights prominent qualities the Bolognese artist absorbed from these precursors: the theatricality of 17th-century Spanish painting; the naturalism of the Italian Seicento; and the intimacy and geometry of Chardin.
The president of Istituzione Bologna Musei, Roberto Grandi, and the responsible for the area Modern and Contemporary Art, Lorenzo Balbi, attended the opening.