The Longhi Foundation offers, in collaboration with the Merlini Collection, a very refined tribute to Giorgio Morandi on the fiftieth anniversary of his death on June 18, 1964.
The seat of this tribute could only be Villa Il Tasso, in Florence, the home of Roberto Longhi, now the headquarters of the Foundation named after him. Here, from 22st to XNUMXnd June, the exhibition “Morandi Longhi. Works Letters Written”, edited by Maria Cristina Bandera, director of Roberto Longh Art History Studies Foundationi, to which we owe important exhibitions of Morandi.
To pay tribute to Morandi and to verify the forward-looking judgment that Longhi expressed on the artist, the Foundation named after the art historian opens its rooms to exhibit Morandi's Landscapes and Still Lifes that belonged to Longhi and were selected by him, alongside the Flowers donated by the painter to the critic and his wife, the writer Anna Banti.
For this occasion, the Cortile di via Fondazza, 1935, which belonged to Longhi for a long time, then donated to his doctor, and now in the Merlini collection, will return 'home', even if only temporarily. The canvas will be accompanied by other works from the same collection: two paintings - Natura morta, 1948 (formerly owned by Emilio Jesi where it was selected by Morandi for his room at the IV Brazil Biennial in 1957 for which he obtained the Grand Prix for painting ) and Flowers, 1957 – and from a watercolor, Natura morta, 1956, from the important exhibition history.
Furthermore, the presence of three engravings donated by Morandi to Longhi, restored for this occasion by Mariella Gnani, curator of the Merlini collection, now exhibited for the first time, will make it possible to retrace the long stretch of the great painter's artistic journey through the privileged techniques in which he expressed himself.
The display of some handwritten letters from Morandi addressed to the art historian and Longhi's handwritten notes dedicated to the painter will make this exhibition unique.
In the exhibition halls the recording of the program "l'Approdo" will be projected in which Longhi, in June fifty years ago, remembers Morandi in front of the entrance door of his studio, flanked, then as now, by an oleander plant.
Those of the painter and art historian, both born in 1890, were almost two parallel lives, so much were they united by youthful interests, by meetings and exchanges of opinion in mature age in Bologna, where one lived and the other he taught from 1934. Indeed, precisely in his opening address at the University of Bologna in which he retraced the Moments of Bolognese painting, Longhi officially consecrated the painter by electing him "one of the best living painters in Italy". From that time began their long partnership marked by a deep and mutual admiration.
Intellectual frequentation and closeness of thoughts, that between the painter and his critic, which continued also in the thirty years to come, as is attested by the letters they exchanged when Longhi moved to Florence in 1939, taking up a house with Il Tasso, on the hills surrounding Florence. Correspondence that intensified in the XNUMXs, when the war – Longhi recalls it – “reduced him, then even interrupted the almost daily practice” of the Bolognese “critical rounds”.
After the blackout of the war events, to "welcome back" to Morandi and as a "sign of sympathetic concern for his uncertain fate", Longhi organized an exhibition at the Il Fiore gallery which was inaugurated in the newly liberated Florence on 21 April 1945, accompanying it with a text that remains an essential viaticum to understand the art of the great artist.
Finally, it will be up to Longhi to remember "the great painter" at the moment of his death for the television program "L'Approdo", recorded in June 1964. To the words moved by the loss of a great "Friend", strengthened by the certainty that there would more states "other, new paintings by Morandi", the critic does not miss his own vis polemic. In fact, he underlines how "a capricious but not meaningless nemesis" had wanted "Morandi to leave the scene on the very day in which the products of 'pop art' were exhibited in Venice". But above all Longhi, with almost prophetic words, will give a sort of energy to this greeting, projecting the figure of Morandi into the future, assigning him a leading role: "I mean that Morandi's stature will be able, will have to grow further, after these last fifty years will have been equally reduced”, after which “very few will remain to be counted, perhaps on the fingers of a single hand; and Morandi will be second to none”.
