Description:
Meticulous yet sensitive, Meyerowitz's photographic inventory of Giorgio Morandi's studio recaptures the delicate depiction of light for which the painter was renowned
In the spring of 2015, the world-renowned photographer Joel Meyerowitz spent time at Giorgio Morandi's studio at 36 via Fondazza in Bologna. The simple rooms where Morandi painted are awash with objects--vases, tins, shells, bottles and jugs--stacked on shelves, sideboards, chests of drawers and overflowing onto the floor. Morandi would select these objects and arrange them on makeshift tables so that he could render them, and the light that fell upon them, attentively and deliberately in oil, watercolor and pencil, creating an elusive body of work that has influenced artists ever since. Some 50 years after Morandi died, in the very same space, using Morandi's surfaces and the same light source to cast the same shadows, Meyerowitz lived with the same objects. He carefully photographed every object in the studio, and, by instilling each with confidence and individuality, in turn, made them his own.
Originally published in 2016, this expanded and revised edition includes more than 130 new photographs, a new essay by Amanda Renshaw and an updated bibliography.
Joel Meyerowitz (born 1938) is a street, portrait and landscape photographer. His work has appeared in over 350 exhibitions around the world and is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and many other museums worldwide.
Review Quotes: Dusty, smeared in paint, sanded down... the bottles, jars and vases that remain in Giorgio Morandi's preserved studio in Bologna have no inherent value, except that they played starring roles in over a thousand still lifes painted by the Italian master. In a new book, street photographer Joel Meyerowitz presents a visual inventory of these humble household objects, --Miss Rosen "World of Interiors"