"I paint and I carve landscapes and still lifes". Only a few words, uttered with his usual severe measure, were enough for Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964) to summarize his art, the essence of ascetic rigour and meticulous reflections on a few subjects (still lifes and landscapes, to be exact) that were tirelessly probed. He created so many still life paintings (which were austere and vibrant compositions made up of bottles and little jars, jugs and old lamps) that he became known everywhere as the “painter of bottles”; he ultimately reserved an affiliated, although substantial, position within his artistic production to landscapes (which he chose to refer to as “paesi” (towns), rather than “paesaggi” (landscapes)) .  "And to think that I used to love landscapes the most”, he later declared and also confessed that “but that meant travelling and stopping in one place or the other and then returning there in order to finish off the job”.  And perhaps the reasons for his painting less landscapes lie in the loving and punctilious attention he had for landscapes, that he singled out through meticulous research and that he painted only after having established the best angle and prolonged introspection.  A man of solitude and tradition, Morandi made his way through the most important Italian art movements, from Futurism to Metaphysics, from the “Valori Plastici” review to the 20th century, without being stunned by them, subtracting himself from the slavery of other people’s rules which (in art as in life) always end up subjecting those who cannot create their own.  The Morandi standards included two fundamental rules:  "I believe that expressing nature, namely the visible world, is what I am most interested in” and "I constantly work with reality”.  The master from Bologna, a reserved man life few others, abided by these rules by matching the boundaries of his world and his art with his workshop located in the city of Bologna (in Via Fondazza) and with his country residence in Grizzana. Morandi turned these fragments of a world into the intimate and vibrant images of chaste bottles and weekday jars, of assorted landscapes, especially the arid badlands of the Apennines just outside Bologna, in the area of Grizzana, where the artist spent his summers and the war period, but also the modest courtyard of his home in Bologna.  Tone painting, severe and well-balanced, difficult and secret, where poor everyday items were the pretext for expressing feelings.  Worn-out little jars, empty bowls and dusty bottles covered with opaque colours, rejecting the seduction of transparency; in addition to dazed landscapes, reduced to lyrical geometry, almost on the edge of abstraction that escaped the traps of entropy, surprisingly successful in recreating life and rendering its essence.
However, as Federico Zeri recalled, "while everyone knows him as the author of still lifes, few are aware of his other activity, namely as a landscape artist. […] I consider these paintings as the highest landscape masterpieces of all times.  They betray affectionate attention towards the early works by Corot; at times one can perceive very indirect and transfigured reflections belonging to Cézanne" .  For this reason, all the more precious is the exhibition set up in the halls of the Ferrero Foundation in Alba that explores the essence of landscape in the art by the master from Bologna through approximately seventy works, which are prevalently paintings and a rigorous selection of watercolours.  A further appealing element of the display lies in the origin of these works, which were almost all destined by Morandi to his most loyal companions, artists and intellectuals, from Malaparte to Casella, from Soffici to Campana and Ungaretti; in addition to his early collectors and admirers, patrons, art critics and historians, Longhi and Vitali, Brandi and Magnani, Ragghianti, Venturi and Arcangeli – weaving the story of Morandi’s art together with the culture of those times.
The exhibition begins with a precious group of early works dating back to the second decade of the XX century, starting off with the influential "Nevicata" dated 1910 – lacking human voices and presences as all of his future landscapes, flanked by works of the forthcoming years such as "Paesaggio Vitali" (1911), mindful of Cubism and the lessons of Cézanne, in addition to the undertones of Rousseau Le Douanier, as proof of the untiring research for independent expressiveness and a refinement in style of the solitary man from via Fondazza.  A crucial moment in the poetics of Morandi’s works were the towns painted over the following decade, which were in line with Italian tradition - Giotto, Masaccio, Piero della Francesca -  and innervated it with a sense of contemporaneousness so much more extreme as it was dissimulated.  Therefore the geometry of Cézanne welcomed slight traces of colour, recalling the whitewashing of XV-century frescoes. The landscapes were severe, absolute and with a firm structure, distant from any form of naturalism, where the few houses, that were as close as solid geometries stood out, in the late morning light, against skies enamelled in blue of Piero della Francesca purity.  During the 1930s Morandi reached the peak of his independent grandeur and his highest results.  The meditated harmony of forms was mirrored in the perfection of tones:  the gloomy landscapes, as “useless” as the bottles and bowls that inhabited his still lifes, definitely revealed their essence as “pure” pretexts of expression.  This occurred especially in the landscapes of Grizzana, created by Morandi during the tragic years of war as a further essential hub of the artist from Bologna, and one of the highest moments of Italian XX-century art.  Extolling a larger monochrome-filled background than the previous decade, when colour still outlined the presence of objects, coagulating light for sharper and more dramatic contrast, Morandi subtracted body and texture from the matter.  This was until he only left little more than a modulated veil on the canvas where the hills and valleys of the Apennine Mountains in the Emilia region seemed washed away by time, the shrouds of loneliness and desolation.  The review in Alba comes to a close with the absorbed contemplation aroused by the “via Fondazza courtyards” series dating back to the 1950s, flanked by the Grizzana landscapes of his later years.  One witnesses a progressive dematerialization of reality into light, the thinning of painting that shattered the boundary between landscape and still life:  an example of this is exhibited through the combination of a “Landscape” painted in 1962 and a “Still Life” from 1963.  They both give life, embody and implement the words spoken by Morandi which made him famous:  “There is nothing more abstract that reality”.