«Giorgio Morandi is not the Pilgrim Madonna. I am against the transfer of the Museum dedicated to him in Palazzo Pepoli, where until now there was the Museum of the history of the city. It would be the fourth move, since Maria Teresa, the last of the sisters, granted her brother’s works to the Municipality of Bologna. No, Morandi deserves more respect. Either we keep him at Mambo, where he has been since 2012, or if we really want to move him… then I say we bring his most important works to via Fondazza, at n.36 where they were born, with its particular light, the garden he portrayed and which now needs to be cared for, enhanced, not entrusted to volunteers. It’s the only place where he laughs in the photo.”
Abramowicz’s book
Pier Luigi Cervellati goes wild, among images, books, notes. There is also a photo of Janet Abramowicz, the American who was her engraving student at the Academy of Fine Arts: in the image she is with her husband, Artur, one of the general’s Poles who liberated the city on 21 April 1945. The couple smiles, Morandi too, surrounded by the painter’s garden. The Art of Silence is Abramowicz’s book, dedicated to Morandi. Cervellati grew up in via Fondazza 73. «I was a bit ashamed… it was a street of those that Lucio Dalla would later sing about, I preferred to say that my house was opposite Giorgio Morandi’s studio». In October he turns 86, he is one of the uncomfortable great old men (“old men”), the former venerable masters of Bologna, he was a councilor with Giorgio Fanti and Renato Zangheri, an architect, a teacher in Venice, his Plan for the historic center of Bologna became famous throughout the world, in 1973 the Accademia dei Lincei awarded him the Feltrinelli Prize, in the 2000s he rebuilt the Galli Theater in the center of Rimini, the Oratory of San Filippo Neri in Bologna.
Transfer costs
«I know very well that they accuse me of being the past. For me, every city history museum must start from today, must explain the present by traveling through the time in which it was created. I don’t know if it was like this with Palazzo Pepoli… Bringing Morandi there now is a senseless operation. What does Via Castiglione have to do with it? The Middle Ages remade? Maria Teresa had demanded Palazzo d’Accursio because the Municipality, the square, the heart is there. Then, with controversy, in 2012 Morandi’s works were transferred to the Mambo in via Don Minzoni, then came the project of the Palazzina Magnani in via Azzo Gardino, 1,330 meters of eighteenth-century villa with garden, all abandoned, formerly owned by the State, purchased by the Municipality in 2020 for one billion and 900 million. More controversies. Now Palazzo Pepoli in via Castiglione, only because the Cassa di Risparmio Foundation no longer wants to bear the costs (the History Museum is already closed, today, Wednesday 24 April, there is a fact-finding hearing requested by the Civic Coalition in the city council, ed.). Via Castiglione is a beautiful road, but how much does it cost to take Morandi there? There is always a shortage of money, let’s think about Garisenda.”
The house where the artist lived
There are 250 works kept in the Museum, how do they fit in Via Fondazza? The house rented in the 1930s by the Morandi family was two hundred meters long. «In the meantime, let’s look at how many works are exhibited at the Mambo. Mine is not a provocation, it is an invitation to think seriously about what Giorgio Morandi and his places mean. Contextualize it, don’t make it an icon that you carry around the city without an overall vision. I proposed making a museum in the house where Morandi lived in 1978, when the sisters moved. Then nothing happened. Zangheri already had enough to think about with the public housing plan for the historic center, to maintain a social fabric, historic inhabitants.”
The correspondence between Morandi and De Sica
However, Casa Morandi remains difficult to use. Isn’t it enough how it is valued now, with the reconstruction of how the painter lived and worked? «Morandi is a context. Not just rooms. The barber, when he passed, said: “Here is the great master. From his bottles, if the painting is knocked over, the water also flows out”. A few years ago its inhabitants made Fondazza a social, community street. The Municipality should think about this. There is a correspondence from 1949 between Morandi and Vittorio De Sica, who had hosted him in Rome. The director says that he has not forgotten the muscat roses seen in the garden behind the church of Sant’Agnese in Agone, promising the Maestro to have them delivered to Bologna, to transplant them into the garden on Via Fondazza. “I have in my eyes the quiet beauty of that garden of his and of the houses in front of his window”. There is a long exchange on the delicacy of the operation, the painter announces that he has the painting ready to give to De Sica for his next visit to Fondazza. In April ’50 the roses bloom. Even Michelangelo Antonioni and Monica Vitti were enchanted by the garden.” A series of floral paintings were given by Morandi to Anna Banti, wife of Roberto Longhi, the great critic who had culminated in the name of Morandi – a new “walking path” – in his 1934 speech at the University of Bologna, where he had students Attilio Bertolucci, Giorgio Bassani, Pier Paolo Pasolini. Francesco Arcangeli, 14 February marked 50 years since his death, went to Fondazza to have the biography he was writing about the Master read, reread and corrected, who however “excommunicated” him together with his work, published only after the painter’s death , in 1964.
Morandi and the context
«La Fondazza is history and meaning – says Cervellati -. I remember the walks in the little square under Morandi’s house with Arcangeli, with Cesare Gnudi, who lived in via San Petronio Vecchio, with Andrea Emiliani. Thinking about Fondazza is thinking about Morandi and Bolognese painting, the lights, the choices, the shadows, the methods. You cannot choose a museum by chance, because it is left free.” If Fondazza isn’t possible, is it better for everything to stay at Mambo? «Of course, Pepoli had nothing to do with it. How much does it cost to redo the entire City Museum? We need to find a museographic director… Morandi is in a context, at least at Mambo he reinforces a search for meaning that I have not seen so far. Community, city. There are the Bolognese painters and the collections there. The Film Library. The University. They have opened some very active galleries. How can we continue to talk about Manifattura delle Arti if we bring Morandi to via Castiglione? In via Lame there was the second-hand dealer from whom he bought the objects which he then painted. He dedicated a lot of time to the composition phase. He arranged the objects on laying surfaces, covered with sheets of paper, in always different groupings. The intensity of the light in the studio was varied with curtains on the windows and the shade of the background. When he had found the right position he traced the outline of the objects and the shapes of his feet in pencil.”
Tags: error master context move
