GIORGIO MORANDI Natura morta, 1953 oil on canvas, 37 by 38.5cm £600,000-800,000 / €695,000-925,000 / US$790,000-1.1m
Morandi’s 1953 painting Natura Morta is an elegant rendering of the still life subject that was central to the artist’s explorations of the visible world. Following the development of this key theme in his paintings of the war years, in the early 1950s Morandi continued working towards a heightened simplicity and purity of form. His search for new compositional variations through the precise placement of jugs, bottles and boxes, remained of central importance and he began working groups of objects into compact, often flattened and centralised, formations rendered in the lighter palette that is seen in the present work. This carefully reiterated choreography of objects was central to Morandi’s work. Vases and jugs appear and re-appear throughout the years – the coffee-tin with the painted oval, for example, features throughout his work of the late 1940s and early 1950s. The objects were often covered with a layer of dust that shifted and altered, blurring the edges of the objects and offering a hushed sense of passing time.