The author and its double. Considerations on disagreement between Morandi and Arcangeli

Abstract

Arcangeli’s monograph on Giorgio Morandi is the early crack of relations between the young critic and the oldest artist. The essay, published by the Milan gallery Il Milione in 1964, about forty days after the death of the Bolognese master, had a long and complicated editing. Only in 2007 the text was returned to the studies in its original idea, enabling us to understand more clearly the actualizing vision of Arcangeli. Looking back on some of Morandi’s main points of dissent, related to the positions of Longhi and Arcangeli himself expressed in correspondence between the authors, this paper continues to face a more general theoretical reflection on the difficulties that may be involved in drawing up a monograph on a living artist and in direct dialogue with the same, verifying which delicate and complex dynamics are to be established between the two parts.