The Mystery of the Morandi Market

Giorgio Morandi
The average price of a Morandi over the past decade has steadily risen, even accounting for the usual oscillations in the market. Put another way, the highs are getting higher, and the lows are also getting higher. Photo: Archivio Cameraphoto Epoche/Getty Images
Marion Maneker
January 28, 2025

“This is our gift to New York,” said David Leiber, a man not normally prone to grandiose statements, as Julie Davich and I toured the opening of Giorgio Morandi: Masterpieces From the Magnani-Rocca Foundation, which is on loan to David Zwirner’s gallery space on West 20th Street for a brief five weeks. Leiber was explaining why Zwirner had borrowed the Morandis from the private Italian foundation and chose to present them as he had. The gallery, Leiber noted, likes to show art with plenty of wall space around the individual work, which is quite different from the European salon style of exhibition. So the gift here was not merely the chance to behold these Morandis, but also to see them in a different context from how they were normally hung.