Giorgio Morandi’s studio (1890–1964) has been photographed extensively, as have the simple yet iconic objects lined up on his shelves. Among these flasks, bottles, and vases, people have sought the hidden spring of his silent images. Through modulations of tone that are highly material yet “as if disembodied,” according to Yves Bonnefoy, Morandi creates his pictorial universe, extracting simple forms from his immediate environment or from the outside world as observed from his studio.
The studios in Bologna and in Grizzana in the Apennines were, for this artist who travelled very little, true microcosms that were always enough to feed his vision. Hence his development took place largely apart from the contemporary art scene. Linked for a time to Futurism in 1914, he soon focused on the lessons of Cubism and especially Cézanne, before experimenting with Metaphysical painting around 1920. These works—later denied any symbolic meaning by Morandi—earned him the admiration of Giorgio de Chirico, who wrote in 1922: “He looks with the eye of a man who believes; and the intimate skeleton of these things which are dead for us, because immobile, appears to him in its most consoling aspect: in its eternal aspect. He thus takes part in the great lyricism created by the last profound European art: the metaphysics of the most familiar objects. Objects that habit has made so familiar that we, however aware we may be of the mysteries of appearances, often look at them with the eye of the man who looks and does not know.” From that point on, the foundations of Morandi’s work were laid: the investigation of the everyday and the transformation of ordinary objects through simplification in order to express—through a kind of magnifying lens—a global vision of the world.
A SIMPLE AND YET STRANGE REALISM
Without abandoning these everyday objects, Morandi’s work then aligned itself with the “return to order” embodied in Italy by the journal Valori Plastici, founded in 1918. He would never stray from this simple and yet strange realism, expressed through a limited number of themes: still lifes, flower bouquets, and landscapes. Beneath this apparent simplicity, the critical fortune of Morandi’s work reveals its complexity and countless paradoxes: for some he is the heir of the highest figurative tradition, from Chardin to Corot; for others, a jewel of modernism, in which the endlessly reworked form takes precedence over content. Recent studies alternately emphasize a formalist reading of this serial oeuvre or a political approach highlighting his links with the ideas of the Strapaese movement, a branch of Fascism that championed provincial and rural values. Avant-garde and/or reactionary, Morandi’s art certainly draws from these multiple sources, but it is quite difficult to give voice to the “almost absolute silence” of his works invoked by Bonnefoy.
Recognizing Morandi’s still lifes, on the other hand, is easy, and they soon seem familiar. Bound together by their muted chromatic range, from grey to beige, they are also linked by the objects that recur from one work to another in varied arrangements. Morandi worked by reducing space, the number of objects, and the effects produced. And the neutrality of the objects and situations—only seemingly accidental and banal—reveals, on the contrary, the strong imprint of an artistic will to impose form. Studies have shown the slow preparatory work preceding the execution of the paintings, during which the objects pass into the universe of painting. They are painted on the outside or on the inside to limit reflections and transparencies, then arranged on a grid that geometrically determines their positions and relationships, and finally placed under precise lighting; Morandi used deliberately only a few areas of his studio, always the same ones. His economy of means is pushed to the limit by the invariably plain backgrounds, and yet the possibilities for variation, however minimal, seem infinite. And if there is any mastery of the world, it does not lie in the meticulous detail and rendering of textures sought by the Flemish, but in an almost obsessive rigor of mental construction. From this, when the work is considered as a whole, comes an impression of a systematic inventory carried out on a portion of reality, of a combinatorial game applied to deliberately banal objects. And by a final reversal, the flip side of this affirmation of mastery lies in the submission to the sensory world, in the wonder at its infinite resources—resources that even a lifetime of painting could not exhaust.
The Mystery of the Emergence of Things
Morandi’s deliberate simplicity and banality in fact only exalt the mystery of the emergence of things in the world. The poet Yves Bonnefoy expressed the paradox of these objects: “Pressed together, sometimes even superimposed, almost glued: yet they remain strangers to one another, just as they seem to be strangers to themselves, vases that could not contain, necks whose trembling form has removed them from space. There are tables, but more as a question—about the ‘why’ of the things that clutter them—than as a place for life.” Everything in Morandi’s work is a matter of distance and, beyond the difference of subject matter, the comparison with the bodies ceaselessly observed by Alberto Giacometti soon becomes evident. Positioning oneself at the right distance from things, while keeping one’s distance—this seems to have been Morandi’s aim, for distance allows one both to grasp and to transform objects, to capture their essential lines, and to introduce the time of perception into the process. According to Cesare Brandi, the landscapes painted by Morandi were always very far from his vantage point, almost within binocular range. Bonnefoy comments: “Those one or two kilometers of physical expanse, which dissolved the contours, allowed him to reform them in the rarefied and shifting air of the small, unstable instrument—or to dream, meanwhile.” In this space separating artist and objects, in the time of their emergence, their perception and transformation take place. From this arise, inseparably, the magic and the irreducible imperfection of representation. And if the placement of objects is of such importance, and if the combinations are imperturbably modified, it is because the artist seeks to find the distances that, while separating and making the objects exist individually, bind them inseparably to one another. The eye thus oscillates constantly between grasping a whole and recognizing isolated entities, between the homogeneity of light and tones and the perception of contours that isolate. In the succession of these canvases, the most evident and mysterious visual experience is enacted: that by which the world appears to us, offers itself, and withdraws in the same movement—always the same, endlessly renewed—a marvellous and tragic experience that for Morandi justifies the repetition of still lifes and the formal explorations they engender.
