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Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) Gorgio Morandi was born in Bologna in 1890. At the age of sixteen, he went to work in his father's commercial office, but in 1907 he also enrolled at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Bologna, where he graduated in 1913. Morandi was influenced by the Italian masters Giotto, Paolo Uccello, Masaccio and Piero della Francesca, but also by Vermeer, Chardin, Corot and especially Cézanne.Throughout his career, Morandi produced almost exclusively still lives and landscapes (with the exception of a few self-portraits). In 1914, he briefly digressed into a Futurist style and also exhibited at the second Rome Secession. In that same year, Morandi was appointed instructor of drawing for elementary schools in Bologna — a post he held until 1929.In 1915, he joined the army but suffered a breakdown and was indefinitely discharged. During the war, Morandi's still lives became more reduced in their compositional elements and purer in form, revealing his admiration for both Cézanne and the Douanier Rousseau. Morandi knew De Chirico's and Carrà’s work through reproductions in the journal La Raccolta. Edited by Morandi's fellow Bolognese, Giuseppe Raimondi, La Raccolta represented the post-war attitude of a "return to order" and to traditional artistic craft, and was the first to recognize Morandi's work.In 1918, Morandi became affiliated with the journal Valori Plastici and his work was included in the group's exhibition which traveled throughout Germany in 1921. During the period of Valori Plastici Morandi painted a series of enigmatic still lives with starkly-modeled objects immobilized in an anti-naturalistic space and light. In the catalogue essay for the exhibition of the Fiorentina Primaverile in 1922, de Chirico defined Morandi's work as the "metaphysics of everyday objects."By the early twenties Morandi's art had abandoned any reference to Metaphysical painting, and focused increasingly on subtle gradations of hue, tone, and objects arranged in a unifying atmospheric haze. Morandi showed in the Novecento italiano exhibitions of 1926 and 1929, but was more specifically associated with the regionalist Strapaese group by the end of the decade. In 1927 he exhibited at the Seconda esposizione dell'incisione moderna in Florence. His work was widely reproduced and discussed by the Strapaese critics Mino Maccari and Leo Longanesi in the journals Il Selvaggio and L’Italiano. They considered him the quintessential Italian artist: he embodied independence from European currents and an appreciation of Italian small-town life, as epitomized in the consistency and simplicity of his still lives. Morandi was devoted to the medium of etching, and increasingly so from the late twenties.From 1930 to 1956, he was professor of printmaking at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Bologna. In 1935, in Momenti della pittura bolognese, Roberto Longhi defined him as "one of the best living painters in Italy," a reputation that continued in the post-war years as Morandi was additionally perceived as one of the few artists to have escaped the taint of Fascism, and to have evolved a style of pure pictorial values congenial to modernist abstraction. Morandi visited Paris for the first time in 1956. He died in Bologna in 1964.