Still anybody who doesn't know Morandi's color palette? His color palette seemed to become synonymous with high aesthetics overnight. He has a Buddha-like attitude towards life and wants to escape the outside world. In today's world, it feels just like us. We had to stay at home, but he chose to cut socialize.

Giorgio Morandi

Giorgio Morandi (July 20, 1890 – June 18, 1964) was an Italian painter and printmaker who specialized in still life.

Giorgio Morandi' Life

Giorgio Morandi spent most of his life in Bologna, in northern Italy. It is home to the oldest University in Europe, the University of Bologna, established during the Middle Ages. At the same time, at the end of the Renaissance, the three Karachi brothers founded the earliest European Academy of Fine Arts in the same place -- Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna [Academy of Fine Arts of Bologna].

Self-portrait

Giorgio Morandi studied at this school and became a teacher there at his 40, teaching etchings.

He has a very regular life, except teaching, only painting at home, almost no social contact. Italian art historian Leo Longines once described Giorgio Morandi as follows:

"In an ordinary town, where everyone is short and fat, Giorgio Morandi is tall and thin and wears loose clothes, like the people walking in Giacometti's works."

Giorgio Morandi, 20, the eldest son, was already a pillar of the family, making ends meet by teaching children how to paint shuttling between the four blocks of the old town.

When you look for his course of life, you can't find any records that he was ever in love, let alone married. In his 74 years, he seldom left his native land, living with his three single sisters for most of his life.

Except at the age of 25, Morandi was sent to military service and experienced the historical traces of World War I. He spent a month and a half in the 2nd Parma Grenade Corps before being rushed to hospital with severe illness and leaving the hospital.

When he got home, he seemed to lose interest in the outside world. At most, he takes day trips to Venice, Milan or Florence to see exhibitions.

But it was only when he was older than he ventured out of Italy, once to see a Cezanne exhibition in Switzerland and once to Paris.

Cezanne could have Giorgio Morandi walking out of the house because his art influenced him when he was a student.

Beginning in 1913, he painted a landscape of the SAN Victor Mountains at his family's summer home; Two years later, an attempt to imitate Cezanne's "Five Bathers" was made, but there were structural problems.

After that, except a couple of self-portraits of himself as a young man, Giorgio Morandi eschewed figural images.

Self-portrait

He was fascinated by Cezanne, which is why he painted so many bottles and cans. Through the daily still life, he found his own way to reduce more, make the objects simple and the picture purer.

Still Life by Cezanne

Still Life by Morandi

The reason for choosing simple subjects, he said in an interview:

"I remembered Galileo's words: the true book of philosophy, the book of nature, is a far cry from our own alphabet. The words are triangle, square, circle, sphere, pyramid, cone, and other geometric shapes. Galileo's ideas supported my long-held belief that the visible world is a world of forms, and that it is difficult, if not impossible, to put into words the feelings and images that sustain it. They are ultimately feelings, feelings that have no connection to daily events."

Morandi Color Palette

In the artist's studio, there are two paint boxes he used during his lifetime, one of which is filled with various glass bottles containing stone powder.

As you can see, Morandi's color palette is more traditional: ground stone, mixed with oil and colored with tubular pigments, which were invented in the mid-19th century.

Therefore, the color on the canvas has a very high purity and transparency. The method looks easy, but the modulation is very complicated.

Balthus once said: "Morandi is undoubtedly the closest European painter to Chinese painting, and he was frugal to the extreme in materials. His artistic realm is consistent with Chinese art in concept."