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April 10, 2026
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"..my own paintings of that period (1916 â 1919) remain pure still-life compositions and never suggest any metaphysical, surrealist, psychological, or literary considerations at all [reacting on similarities with the art of CarrĂ , and de Chirico, suggested by the interviewer]. My milliners' dummies, for instance, are objects like others and have not been selected to suggest symbolic representations of human beings of legendary or mythological characters. The only titles that I chose for these paintings were conventional, like 'Still Life, Flowers or Landscape', without any implications of strangeness of an unreal world [as in Surrealism or in 'Pittura Metafisica' of De Chirico]."
"A white bottle is all that remain."
"I am now working on a still life with a bottle and other objects spread out on a plane and it seems to be turning out well."
"Accounts have long described Morandi as a provincial painter, leading a quiet and isolated life, un-involved in politics and unaffiliated with any artistic movement - a reticent man so intently focused on his still-life compositions of household objects that he earned the moniker 'the painter of bottles.' It is becoming increasingly clear, however, that established Morandi scholarship avoids complexities and ambiguities in both his life and work that could result in a much richer narrative:. ..an artist responsive to contemporary avant-garde movements, seen in his lesser-known paintings that reveal Futurist, Cubist, pittura metafisica, and Strapaese influences. Morandi's mature works are more difficult to characterize; he embraced neither abstraction nor the propagandistic realism of the 'Novecento' movement. Perhaps Morandi's relative obscurity outside of Italy comes from his distinct place outside of any twentieth-century 'ism'."
"If you could see what these flowers are. [Morandi's remark, circa 1917 - to the writer Raimondi from Bologna, indicating flowers in the corner of a reproduction of a painting by w:El Greco â beneath the feet of angels and saints]). No modern painter has painted flowers like these. Perhaps only Renoir"
"Quote in Morandi's letter of 14 Oct. 1919 to the Futurist painter Carlo CarrĂ ; as cited in Morandi 1894 â 1964, ed: M. C. Bandera & R. Miracco, Museo dâArte Moderna di Bologna, 2008; p. 92"
"When most Italian artists of my own generation were afraid to be too 'modern,' too 'international' in their style, not 'national' or 'imperial' enough, I was still left in peace, perhaps because I demanded so little recognition. My privacy was thus my protection and, in the eyes of the Grand Inquisitors of Italian art, I remained a provincial professor of etching, at the Fine Art Academy in Bologna."
"My only source of instruction has always been the study of works, whether of the past or contemporary artists, which can offer us an answer to our questions if we formulate these properly.. .I would never be of much use as a guide or instructor, nor have I ever wanted to be one, even when I have been asked to undertake the job [still, Morandi was art professor - etchings - at the Art Academy of Bologna for many years]. [the text of this interview was later examined by Morandi and approved in the English translation]"
"Among the ancient painters, the Tuscan's are the ones that interest me more: above all Giotto and Massacio [in early Renaissance]. Of the modern painters I think that Corot, Courbet, Fattori, and Cezanne are the most legitimate heirs to the glorious Italian tradition."
"Let us hope that these dark days [Summer in 1943 when Morandi took refuge from the war in Grizanna where he remained on his own for a year] will be followed by better ones. I work, but these continual worries are extremely tiring, believe me. I should like to see you again.."
"Last year I visited the painter Morandi in Bologna. He expressed to me his sympathy with the young art students of the present day. "There are so many possible ways to paint," he said, "it's all so confusing for them. There is no central craft which they can learn, as you or I could once learn a craft.""
"Titian, Tintoretto, and Paul Veronese absolutely enchanted me, for they took away all sense of subject. ... It was the poetry of color which I felt, procreative in its nature, giving birth to a thousand things which the eye cannot see, and distinct from their cause."
"In that Renaissance (Cellini, Tintoretto, Titian..) there was an explosion of unique truthfulness, a love of painting and form.. ..Then come the Jesuits and everything is formal; everything has to be taught and learned. It required a revolution for nature to be rediscovered; for Delacroix to paint his beach at Etratat, Corot his roman rubble, Courbet his forest scenes and his waves. And how miserable slow that revolution was, how many stages it had to go through!.. ..These artists had not yet discovered that nature has more to do with depth than with surfaces. I can tell you, you can do things to the surface.. ..but by going deep you automatically go to the truth. You feel a healthy need to be truthful. Youâd rather strip your canvas right down than invent or imagine a detail. You want to know."
"Great art, for those who insist upon this rather philistine concept (as if un-great art were unworthy of even their most casual and ill-informed attention), makes us stand back and admire. It rushes upon us pell-mell like the work of Rubens or Tintoretto or Delacroix, or towers above us. There is of course another aesthetic: the art of a Vermeer or a Braque seeks not to amaze and appal but to invite the observer to come closer, to close with the painting, peer into it, become intimate with it. Such art reinforces human dignity."
"In his own paintings, Depero depicted a fantastic world of vegetal, animal and mechanical forms, in a dynamic synthesis of large, flat areas of bright color. In 1919 he founded the Casa d'Arte Futurista in Rovereto, where he produced furniture, objects, graphics, posters and tapestries, with his wife Rosetta. During the 1920s Depero spent some months in Paris, where he showed in the Italian pavilion of the Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes, with Balla and Prampolini. Depero experimented with built structures designed out of letters-what he termed "typographical" or "advertising architecture.""
"[Depero] did not differentiate between âmajorâ and âminorâ arts, putting all on the same level."
"If a painter once devoted himself to dynamism and now abandons it, denies it and even criticizes it, it is his own business. This does not mean, however that futurism has had his day. It is always worthy of interest and many artists still work in its ranks with unchanged passion. Dynamism is in life and in nature itself."
"His playful imagination found expression in the series of Plastic Dances (balli plastici) which he designed in 1917 and produced the next year at the Teatro dei Piccoli (Childrenâs Theater) in Rome. During the 1920s he designed exhibition booths and pavilions for various firms and events. Depero was in Paris from 1925 to 1926, then in New York from 1928 to 1930 when he designed covers for Vanity Fair, Vogue, and other magazines. Many of his designs were for the Campari company, and he theorized this work in âFuturism and Advertising Artâ"
"The Futurists were the first painters, poets, and architects who exalted modern work with their artâ"
"The art of the future will be largely advertising. that bold and unimpeachable lesson I have learned from museums and great works from the pastâ all art for centuries past has been marked by advertising purposes: the exaltation of the warrior, the saint; documentation of deeds, ceremonies, and historical personages depicted at their victories, with their symbols, in the regalia of command and splendorâ even their highest products were simultaneously meant to glorify something: architecture, royal palaces, thrones, drapery, halberds, standards, heraldry and arms of every sortâ there is scarcely an ancient work that doesnât have advertising motifs, a garland with a trophy, with weapons of war and victory, all stamped with seals and the original symbols of clans, all with the self-celebrating freedom of ultra-advertising"
"Futurism attracted me and made me better, gave me a new strength, showed me new fields and possibilities."
"The first and foremost critic of a work of art is the artist who created it. Give him every means to illustrate it and make it known. If an artist awaits celebrity or gratefulness for his work through other people, he will have the time to die a thousand times for sheer hunger."
"We Futurists, Balla and Depero, seek to realize this total fusion in order to reconstruct the universe by making it more joyful, in other words by an integral re-creation. 'We will give skeleton and flesh to the invisible, the impalpable, the imponderable and the imperceptible. We will find abstract equivalents for all the forms and elements of the universe, and then well will combine them according to the caprice of our inspiration, to shape plastic complexes which we will set in motion."
"I have said that Marinetti was.. ..exceptionally gifted, and I should add that I never saw him twiddling his thumbs even for ten minutes.. ..beside his desk he often kept piles of books in which he would write dedications.. ..invariably with the purpose of spreading the word about Futurism."
"Stumbling into the midst of anarchists, barely 18 years old, I too started to dream of 'inevitable changes, inhuman society, free love', etc."
"He (Picasso, ed.) is almost one of us [the Futurists]."
"Boccioni and I were swiftly persuaded that with this show in Paris we were staking our all; for a flop would have meant kissing our fine aspirations goodbye. This is why we decided to go to Paris, to see what the art situation there was like."
"Boccioni, Russolo and I all met in the Porta Vittoria cafĂŠ [in Milan, Italy], close to where we all lived, and we enthusiastically outlined a draft of our appeal [the Manifesto of Futurist Painters, late February, 1910]. The final version was somewhat laborious; we worked on it all day, all three of us and finished it that evening with Marinetti and the help of Decio Cinti, the group's secretary."
"..that dizzy seething of forms and acoustic lights, rowdy and smelly [visible in the paintings at the Futurist exhibition, February 1912 in Paris].. ..to obtain this total painting which calls for the active cooperation of all the senses: painting of the plastic mood of the universal, you have to paint the way drunkards sing and vomit, sounds, noises and smells."
"This bubbling and whirling of forms and lights, composed of sounds, noises, and smells has been partly achieved by me in my 'Anarchical funeral' [the painting Carra painted ca 1910-1911, ed.].. ..by Umberto Boccioni in his 'States of Minds' and 'Forces of a Street' [both paintings Boccioni painted in 1911], by Russolo in 'Rebellion' (1911) and Severini in 'Pan-Pan [the first version, Severini painted in 1909-1911], paintings which were violently discussed at our first Paris exhibition in 1912."
"We [The Futurists] stand for a use of colour free from the imitation of objects and things as coloured objects. We stand for an aerial vision in which the material of colour is expressed in all of the manifold possibilities our subjectivity can create."
"The idea for this picture came to me one winter's night as I was leaving La Scala. In the foreground there is a snow sweeper with a few couples, men in top hats and elegant ladies. I think that this canvas, which is totally unknown in Italy, is one of the paintings where I best represented the concept that I had the time about my art."
"[paintings as] the plastic equivalent of the sounds, noises and smells found in theaters, music-halls, cinemas, brothels, railways station, ports."
"We insist that our concept of perspective is the total antitheses of all static perspective. It is dynamic and chaotic in application, producing in the mind of the observer a veritable mass of plastic emotions."
"Reds, rrrrreds, the rrrrreddest rrrrreds that shouuuuuuut."
"When we talk of architecture, people usually think of something static; this is wrong. What we are thinking of is an architecture similar to the dynamic and musical architecture achieved by the Futurist musician Pratella. Architecture is found in the movement of colours, of smoke from a chimney and in metallic structures, when they are expressed in states of mind which are violent and chaotic."
"The Cubists, to be objective, restrict themselves to considering things by turning around them, to produce their geometric writing. So they remain at a stage of intelligence which sees everything and feels nothing, which brings everything to a standstill in order to describe everything. We Futurists are trying, on the contrary, with the power of intuition, to place ourselves at the very center of things, in such a way that our ego forms with their own uniqueness a single complex. We thus give plastic planes a plastic expansion in space, obtaining this feeling of something in perpetual motion which is peculiar to everything living."
"I was walking along the Boulevard des Italiens [in February 1912, during a group exhibition of Futurist painters in Paris] when, as I passed in front of a newspaper stand, I had the pleasant surprise of seeing on the front page of the Journal the reproduction of my picture 'The Funeral of the Anarchist Galli'."
"This bubbling and whirling of forms and lights, composed of sounds, noises, and smells has been partly achieved by me [= Carra,] in my 'Anarchical funeral' [the painting, Carra painted ca 1910-1911].. ..by Boccioni in his 'States of Minds' and 'Forces of a Street' [both paintings Boccioni painted in 1911], by Russolo in 'Rebellion' (1911) and Severini in 'Pan-Pan' [the first version, which Severini painted in 1909-1911], paintings which were violently discussed at our first Paris [Futurist] exhibition in 1912."
"They did not want anything to do with me in Paris and they [the younger Futurist artists Boccioni and Gino Severini ] were right: they have gone much further than I, but I will work and I too will progress."
"Boccioni, Russolo and I all met in the Porta Vittoria cafĂŠ [in Milan, Italy], close to where we all lived, and we enthusiastically outlined a draft of our appeal [the Manifesto of Futurist Painters, late February, 1910]. The final version was somewhat laborious; we worked on it all day, all three of us and finished it that evening with Marinetti and the help of w:Decio Cinti, the group's secretary."
"In the brief life span of the Italian Futurist movement, the short-lived Umberto Boccioni was a blazing comet.. .Boccioni was a fiery theoretician of the movement, drafting two Futurist Manifestos in 1910 and 1912 that exalted the force and energy of contemporary life. They called for an art that glorified speed, violence and the machine age, one that above all reflected the dynamism of an engine-driven civilization."
"Boccioni's gift was to bring a fresh eye to reality in ways that, we now recognise, defined the nature of the modern movement in the visual arts and literature, too"
"Constructions of a-rhythmical forms, the clash between concrete and abstract forms.. ..The acute angle is passionate and dynamic, expressing will and a penetrating force."
"A horse in movement is not a stationary horse that moves but a horse in a movement, which is to say something other, that should be conceived and expressed as something completely different. It is a question of conceiving objects in movement over and above the motion they carry within themselves. That is, a question of finding a form which is the expression of this new absolute.. .A question of studying the aspects that life has taken on in haste and in consequent simultaneity."
"..the moving whirlwind of modernity through its crowds, its cars, its telegraph poles, its bare, working-class neighbourhoods, its noises, its squeals, its violence, its cruelty, its cynicism, and its relentless pushiness."
"..a member of anarchist and revolutionary circles, attracted in turn by violent action and by dream, before resolving to dedicate him to painting."
"While the impressionists make a table to give one particular moment and subordinate the life of the table to its resemblance to this moment, we synthesize every moment (time, place, form, color-tone) and thus build the table."
"The harmony of the lines and folds of modern dress works upon our sensitiveness with the same emotional and symbolical power as did the nude upon the sensitiveness of the old masters."