This exhibition represented a rare opportunity to see nineteen paintings by Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964), spanning his career from 1914, his early Futurist phase, up to 1957, together with fourteen works by his contemporaries. They are selected from the collection of Augusto and Francesca Giovanardi, who shared a passion for mid-century Italian painting, particularly still lifes and landscapes.
This exhibition comprised twelve oil paintings from four private collections in Florence, together with ten drawings and eighteen etchings from the Estorick Collection, ranging in date from 1912 to 1959. The core of the exhibition comprised nine paintings from the collection of Roberto Longhi (1890-1970), the most important Italian art historian and critic of his time, as well as a life-long friend of the artist and collector of his work. Other works included a 1935 landscape given by Longhi to his doctor, Professor Noferi, a 1943 landscape that was a wedding present Longhi gave to the critic Piero Bigongiari, and a 1936 landscape from the Alberto Della Ragione collection.
In the earliest years of the twentieth century the still life genre underwent something of a renaissance. As artists became increasingly concerned with purely formal, pictorial values, it came to be considered a perfect vehicle for experimentation with new aesthetics, free from any complicating narrative dimensions.
Giorgio Morandi is one of the most famous and popular Italian painters of the twentieth century, best known for his contemplative still life paintings of familiar objects such as bottles, vases, jugs and boxes, painted in subtle combinations of colour and a narrow range of tones. Yet his work also contains radical ideas about the nature of picture-making and artistic practice that have made it consistently relevant to subsequent generations of artists.
Comprising over 120 works by many of the most prominent Italian artists of the Modernist era, the Estorick Collection opened to the public in January 1998. Described by Sir Nicholas Serota as 'one of the finest collections of early 20th century Italian art anywhere in the world', it was formed in the late 1940s and early 1950s by Eric Estorick (1913-93), an American art-dealer, writer and political scientist, and is the only collection in the United Kingdom dedicated to this turbulent and fascinating period of Italian art.
Containing works by artists including Filippo de Pisis, Fortunato Depero and Giorgio de Chirico, the collection of Alberto Della Ragione provides an extraordinarily comprehensive overview of Italian Modernism.
The Estorick Collection inaugurated its fifteenth-anniversary year with an exhibition of some 80 etchings and watercolours by the master of poetic understatement, Giorgio Morandi.
The Estorick opened its 20th anniversary year with a major exhibition of works from one of the world’s most important collections of modern Italian art, housed at Milan’s Pinacoteca di Brera.
To complement Estorick Collection Uncut, the museum displayed a selection of new works by artist Paul Coldwell. Exhibited alongside the Estorick’s holding of etchings and drawings by Morandi, Coldwell’s prints, sculptures and poems were created in London under lockdown conditions between 2020 and 2021.
In autumn 2021, the Estorick’s entire collection of modern Italian art was on show throughout the museum’s six galleries in a new exhibition, Estorick Collection Uncut.