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| Giorgio Morandi,
Still Life 1947–48, oil on canvas. |
Such a life requires certain characteristics and a known context.
Giorgio Morandi, who lived this life, was searching for the unknown
in his compositions and technique. Of course he was a loner; perhaps
he even suffered from agoraphobia. Such a story might be found in
the pages of the writer Italo Calvino; the context described, but
never truly explained.
Giorgio Morandi taught graphic arts close to his home as a professor
at the Bologna Academy of Fine Arts. But his studio remained his
bedroom, in the house in Bologna where he lived with his three unmarried
sisters. Perhaps the closest he got to a companion in human form
was the dressmaker's mannequin that appears occasionally in his
early works.
Was there a voyeurism about Morandi's work, epitomised in his landscapes
painted from the window with the help of binoculars? If so, it was
of objects rather than of people. Morandi would search out the mystery
of life through the most mundane apparatus, inspecting the inanimate.
By just moving one bottle of a group he would generate a newer mystery
of perception. Sometimes the semblance of Calvino's world seems
almost to descend to that of Monsieur Hulot, Jacques Tati's tragi-comic
figure. But Morandi, while exploring predicaments, never drew on
humour — a sense somehow completely alien to his make-up.
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| Giorgio Morandi,
Still Life 1958, pencil on paper. |
In Morandi's hermetic world each painting would take, on average,
two months to complete. Such still life works as these comprise
most of the fifty pieces on show at Tate Modern. As the newspaper
La Repubblica says (21 May), ‘Morandi si unisce, quegli
anni, solo ad altre solitudini; quella di Giacometti forse; forse
quella di Rothko. Da Londra, una confirma era un pittore Europeo,’
— Morandi is being confirmed in Europe as a painter of world
status. Yet Morandi only twice left Italy in achieving this pinnacle.
Visiting Winterthur, north-east of Zurich, he paints a mysterious,
surreal view; he cannot spend two months on this, but all the same,
he encapsulates the mysterious presence of absence in such an alien
landscape.
Morandi continues to puzzle and perplex us. This is why, at Tate
Modern, after the confusion and distinct banality of 'Century City'
the Tate is fortunate to be able to restore our sense of balance
through Morandi's sublime, and to engender a genuine perception
by the silent offerings of Italy's least explicable 20th century
master. This is all the more important because Morandi stood for
the non-metropolitan ethos; for smaller spatial experiences with
qualities such as ‘Ordinariness and light’, which the
English post-war architects Peter and the late Alison Smithson would
seek to emulate. As early as the late l920s, those opposed to the
radicalism of Novecento art in Italy sought refuge in rural backwaters,
rather as the l980s English 'Ruralists' did. But in Morandi there
was no nostalgia, which brings him into frame as a modernist, of
sorts.
The Italian 'Strapaese' group of young writers revelled in the
subterfuge of small worlds, and championed Morandi, which makes
his work interesting again today as we flee globalisation. In other
respects his apparent harmony with classical tendencies drew on
the work of Piero della Francesca. More tellingly, Morandi's lifelong
study of, and admiration for, the work of Cezanne is fully evident
in the works on show at Tate Modern: it is with Cezanne and Chardin
that he is most compared. Following involvement early in his career
with Carra, de Chirico, Futurists and Metaphiscal Groups Morandi
was enabled, by studying Cezanne, to break out on his own.
Even in the famous ‘Self-Portrait’ (l924) Morandi appears
as an enigma, his face shaded by the hat, the light falling almost
from a point directly above the painter. It was in the human perception
of the man-made and its inexplicable translation into beauty that
Morandi would continue, in these still-life works, to extend the
optimism of the l920s. Even when he sought to deny individuality
by grouping bottle objects together en masse, he was looking
— however obliquely, however shaded — forward rather than
back. This Tate exhibition now not only celebrates appropriately
enough, Morandi's modernity, it also consolidates his international
importance a generation after his death.
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