It is customary to see the Italian painter Giorgio Morandi (1890-1966) as a somewhat isolated figure, a metaphysician working far from the main currents of twentieth century art, reworking the same motifs in an ever more restricted palette of greys, drab greens and pale pinks. This beautiful exhibition both reinforces and confounds aspects of this view. Morandi's exquisite paintings help conjure the image of an isolated and hermetic artist because of their meditative and repetitive nature; they depict a temperament. On the other hand the exhibition shows, by including a number of works by contemporaries such as Carlo Carra and Mario Sironi, that Morandi's painterly concerns were very much in keeping with those of other Italian artists in the 1930s, 40s and 50s. This is a small exhibition, occupying just two galleries at the Estorick Collection. But a small exhibition perfectly suits Morandi's work. It is the result of intense looking and requires the same of the viewer.
While the second gallery contains a selection of Morandi's landscapes and works by the aforementioned contemporaries, it is the first gallery, dominated by a sequence of still-lifes, which is most fascinating. We begin with a vigorous cubist still life of 1914 which shows Morandi attempting to assimilate the advances of Picasso and Braque. A bottle, box, book and jug stand in a corner of the studio, fractured and on the verge of toppling. Unusually we see what surrounds the subject; in later works Morandi reduces the settings for his compositions to pure planes of colour, thus focussing attention only on the objects depicted. From this starting point Morandi goes on to spend over fifty years exploring groupings of jugs, bottles, vases and boxes on table tops, creating works that are at once subdued and luminous.
The still-lifes of the 1930s seem to balance at the edge of abstraction as Morandi employs a limited range of tones and cuts out all detail and chiaroscuro. As a result the painted objects cease to have any weight; they lose any sense of reality and become arrangements of pure forms. It is as if he has looked so intensely at his subject that it has ceased to make sense, as when one repeat a word again and again until it becomes just sound without meaning. In later works he manages to reconcile his abstracting and realist tendencies; these are simple arrangements of painted shapes but they also convey a powerful sense of the real thing seen. We see this in the two masterpieces of the collection, the Natura Morta of 1953-4, an horizontal arrangement of boxes, two identical white bowls and two identical white vases, and the Natura Morta of 1956, dominated by the dark verticals of a row of long-necked bottles. The objects within the paintings are carefully placed so that their contours run up against each other, and their shapes mirror each other. These are real objects yet in the paintings they become a sequence of carefully composed modulated shapes and colours.
One might level the complaint that Morandi's work is hermetic, that it somehow denies the world, referring to nothing but the studio and its immediate surroundings. The catalogue points out that during the war years, when Picasso was painting symbolic skulls and candles, Morandi is also painting bones, shells and petrified things. An example of these works, a tiny monotone study of two shells, has been included and is one of the most beautiful pieces in the exhibition. But perhaps one misses the point if one searches for this kind of meaning. Isn’t the narrow focus the whole thing? These paintings are about seeing, and their paradoxical simplicity renders them all the richer, more complex and mysterious.
Published on Londonart.org, Sept 1999