Giorgio Morandi's still-lifes. by Peter Schjeldahl

The Art World
Tables for One
Giorgio Morandi's still-lifes. by Peter Schjeldahl September 22, 2008

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"Natura Morta" (1954). Italians so revered Morandi that Fellini used him as a symbol of lofty sensibility in "La Dolce Vita."

"Natura Morta" (1954). Italians so revered Morandi that Fellini used him as a symbol of lofty sensibility in "La Dolce Vita."

Keywords
Morandi, Giorgio;
Painters;
Metropolitan Museum of Art;
Italians;
Retrospectives;
Still-Lifes;
Abramowicz, Janet

In my ideal world, the home of everyone who loves art would come equipped with a painting by Giorgio Morandi, as a gymnasium for daily exercise of the eye, mind, and soul. I want the ad account: "Stay fit the Morandi way!" Take your dream pick from among the hundred and ten works in the potent retrospective of the Italian modern master now at the Metropolitan Museum. You can hardly go wrong with anything dated after 1920 or so, once Morandi, who died in 1964, at the age of seventy-three, had worked through his early involvements with Cézanne, Cubism, Futurism, and the pittura metafisica of Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà. But make your choice a still-life. Morandi painted some striking landscapes and the odd, tentative self-portrait, but the arenas of his greatness were the tabletops in his small studio. He passed nearly his entire life in an apartment in Bologna with his mother, until her death, in 1950, and three younger sisters, who, like him, never married. (His businessman father died in 1909, four years before Morandi's graduation from Bologna's art academy.) Morandi's stagings of his repertory company of nondescript bottles, vases, pitchers, and whatnot are definitive twentieth-century art works. They breathe intimacy with the past—Piero della Francesca, Chardin—and address a future that still glimmers, just out of reach. They remain unbeatably radical meditations on what can and can't happen when three dimensions are transposed into two. Morandi will always rivet painters and educate all who care for painting.

He seems to have cared for nothing else. If he ever had a sexual interest, it is unrecorded. He first set foot outside Italy in 1956, and then only in Switzerland. His most frequent forays were to Florence, to consult Piero, Masaccio, Giotto, and Uccello. A man "unwilling even to squash an insect in his garden," according to a fine biography by Janet Abramowicz, "Giorgio Morandi: The Art of Silence," he suffered a breakdown when he was drafted into the Italian Army, in 1915, after which he was excused from service. He supported himself by teaching painting and etching. (His etchings amaze, triggering subliminal sensations of color with nothing but variations in crosshatched black lines.) He had friends, and he liked to laugh, with the ironical and at times scathing humor of a sensitive man. The academic establishment in Bologna, a university town, disparaged him until late in his career. He participated in the right-wing, ruralist Strapaese movement of the late nineteen-twenties. His attitude toward Mussolini, whose regime gave him teaching jobs, was more positive than not, although he was briefly imprisoned in 1943 for associating with anti-Fascists. (If ever an artist merited political amnesty, on the ground of unworldliness, it would be Morandi.) Fame came to him after the war: he won first prize for an Italian painter at the 1948 Venice Biennale, and became so revered in Italy that filmmakers, notably Federico Fellini, in "La Dolce Vita," used his work as a ready symbol of lofty sensibility. Morandi had a last adventurous phase of nearly abstract drawings and watercolors that condense into swift marks a lifetime of looking.

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The still-lifes vary from bright to crepuscular in tone, from crisply limned to almost illegibly blurred, and, in texture, from creamy to arid. To describe any one of them as exemplary is to provoke tacit protests from the rest. So, in general: The paintings present objects singly, side by side, or in overlapping groups. They feel monumental because they are viewed at eye level, or from just above. (Morandi, who stood six feet four, built a high table that he often used for that purpose.) He disregarded the receding plane of the tabletop, often shrouding the back edge with brown paper, so that it wouldn't distract him. The horizon of that edge commonly seems arbitrary, and the tabletop itself may be woozily indefinite. Morandi anchors his objects frontally, pressed against our gaze. He often paints them all but flat, adding only dim highlights and perfunctory shadings, which at first excite and then gently relax our automatic effort to read roundedness and depth in the pictures. It can take time—minutes, not seconds—to get over what we think we are seeing and to behold what's there. But a sensitive eye may catch on right away. The most helpful piece of writing on Morandi that I know is the painter Vija Celmins's description of her first encounter with one of his still-lifes (in 1961, when she was twenty-one), which "projected an extraordinary set of grays far into the gallery and into my eyes. On closer inspection, I discovered how strange the painting was, how the objects seemed to be fighting for each other's space. One could not determine their size or location. They appeared both flat and dimensional, and were so tenderly painted that the paint itself seemed to be the subject."

The ambiguity of "size or location" is key to Morandi's indelible modernity. It's as if he had set out, time and again, to nail down the whatness of his objects but couldn't get beyond the preliminary matter of their whereness. (He didn't much value the things in themselves. Photographs show that some were slathered or, in the case of clear glass bottles, filled with pigments—they were dedicated to painting the way animals are raised for food.) Morandi was free of the organizing prejudice of perspective. Go look at a Cézanne after seeing this show. It will seem old-fashioned. Conventional pictorial space remained a safety net for the great Frenchman, whose influence Morandi subsumed. Even Picasso didn't as fully abandon perspective—smashing it to localized bits in his Cubism, letting it creep in where it was convenient thereafter. Morandi fumbled, thrillingly, amid the ruins of mental concepts of space. He reversed the thrust of his beloved early-Renaissance inventors of perspective. In an Uccello, say, we register both a mathematical formula of spatial recession and the fact that it is clumsily artificial. Even the majestic Piero fell short of dissolving the preëminent appeal of the painted surface into the fiction of a window view. (Leonardo would do that.) Morandi's eye and mind lived in the surface, marooned there by honest, anxious skepticism. Dramatic uncertainty intensified in his work as he aged. In one of the show's last paintings (the one I want to take home), a jug, whose ochre hue interpenetrates with that of the wall behind it, abuts a tall box in livid, very pale blue; a corrugated ball, half ochre and half greenish blue, rests on the gray table in what would be the foreground—were not the picture, in its effect, all foreground. Dark, jittery outlines startlingly anticipate a look of late work by Philip Guston. That's not unusual in Morandi, whose explorations fortuitously scout the distinctive qualities of subsequent artists. The step from some of his landscapes—with forms at once filmy in color and corporeal in substance—to certain works by the brilliant Luc Tuymans is almost no step at all.

Painting for Morandi was manual labor, first and last. For a time, he ground his own pigments. He stretched his own canvases, constantly varying their proportions. (In the Met show, there are almost as many different sizes of picture as there are pictures.) No one work builds on another. Infinitely refined, Morandi never succumbs to elegance. Even his effulgently pinkish floral still-lifes abjure virtuosity, though they beguile. (One might be made of ice cream; another stiffens to marzipan.) That's because the exigencies of rendering—tiny slippages between eye and hand—constituted, for him, a permanent emergency, requiring incessant adjustment. (Rose petals may jam up like large people competing to pass through a small door.) He did not have a style. He had a signature: "Morandi," written large, often, to broadcast that a picture had done all it could. He is a painter's painter, because to look at his work is to re-create it, feeling in your wrist and fingers the sequence of strokes, each a stab of decision which discovers a new problem.

Color works hard in Morandi. His hues tend toward muddy pastels, always warm. He employs an unabridged dictionary of browns. Even his blues and greens usually secrete invisibly admixed red or yellow, insuring the projection of "an extraordinary set of grays far into the gallery" which Celmins noted. The colors are muted like voices lowered so as not to disturb a sleeper; but their melody and tone penetrate. A Morandi grabs your eye at any distance. Moreover, it's the same picture at any distance, as resolved and unresolved near at hand as far away. (His comprehension of art history skips the Baroque and every other type of synthesized illusion.) Morandi has never been a popular artist and never will be. He engages the world one solitary viewer at a time. The experience of his work is unsharable even, in a way, with oneself, like a word remembered but not remembered, on the tip of the tongue. ♦