© Giorgio Morandi by SIAE 2008

Georgio Morandi, "Natura Morta, 1951" (1951). Oil on canvas, 14 x 15 ½ in.

February 2009 Reviews

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Charline Von Heyl

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Paul Cezanne Giorgio Morandi Chardin C Corot Piero della Francesca Obamas Bring Bold Art to the White House Barnes to Unveil Design for New Philadelphia Home Guggenheim Goes to Abu Dhabi

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The basement level of the Metropolitan Museum’s Lehmann Wing is not an ideal space for painting. A long octagonal hallway with an attached rectangular gallery, it’s both fussy and banal, like a corridor in an upscale chain hotel. It’s also dark, walled off from the wing’s skylit atrium. Fortunately, in this exhibition, at least, the usually disagreeable hallway served a constructive purpose. Its continuous flow helped reveal an artistic development so unwavering in its goal, so imperceptibly gradual as to resemble the bending of a plant toward the light.

Morandi’s familiar still lifes of vessels and boxes on tabletops were arranged chronologically around the octagonal hall, while the rarer genres — self-portraits, landscapes, and flowers — were mostly relegated to the rectangular gallery. The unique quality of these still lifes is to seem always the same yet always different. Natura Morta, 1953, for example, employs objects that appear in many other paintings, but distinguishes itself by virtue of a long horizontal format that accentuates the isolation of five squat objects clustered in the center foreground. Three boxes, the center one a bold yellow, form a defensive wall in front of a deep blue bowl and a jug whose fluted, roseate neck rises watchfully above its companions. This inanimate family huddles together in the middle of the long, low, empty background like refugees on the deck of a ship.

Occasionally, small groupings of different paintings, made at the same time from the same objects, zoomed in on a particular moment within the larger developmental narrative. Each painting in these ensembles of three or four varied from the others only slightly because of a shift of the artist’s point of view or the relocation of a single object. The lesson of such "close-up" comparisons was that in both macro- and microcosm Morandi’s method was the same: the careful selection of a theme (meaning the basic arrangement of objects), followed by variations designed to emphasize the crucial effect on cognition of the smallest change within a visual context.

From 1913, the last year of his schooling, through 1915, Morandi explored Cubism. For the next four years he was associated with pittura metafisica. By 1920 he had arrived at a deceptively quotidian realism tethered to the careful observation of everyday objects. From that moment until his death in 1964, he anchored his work in the rich tradition of French still-life painting that begins with Chardin and ends with Cézanne. In this lineage, still life is profound in inverse proportion to the intrinsic interest of the objects depicted; it’s about what the artist brings to the subject rather than what the subject offers. Stripped of the allegorical, the exotic, the delicious or luxurious objects that furnish most earlier works in the genre, restricted to "things the mind already knows," the subject matter of French still life gradually vanishes, rendering the painting transparent to the artist’s thought.

Although there are important Italian influences on Morandi — among them, della Francesca and Uccello, Carrà and de Chirico — the French provide the essential concepts. Chardin furnishes the tightly packed setups, centered compositions and near-eye-level viewpoints; Corot, especially his early Roman studies, provides the simplified planarity, the plain but subtle touch and the muted, glowing color. Important as these predecessors are, the cornerstone of Morandi’s mature work is Cézanne, the last modernist pioneer for whom empirical observation is primary. Once and for all, Cézanne shifts the emphasis of observation from the description of the thing apprehended to the process of apprehension itself.

Morandi picks up where the older artist left off. He takes the Cézannean dictum about the cone, the cylinder, and the sphere literally, selecting objects that express the geometry intrinsically. For example, in one of the groups of related paintings, all three titled Natura Morta, 1951, the assembled bottles are thin cylinders, differentiated only by color and by the subtly varied tapering of their profiles. Accompanying them are a large conical pitcher and a jug composed of a fat cylinder topped with a low cone. Morandi habitually adds the cube to Cézanne’s vocabulary of essential shapes, and so in the third painting of the set, we find the jug replaced with a small open box. By radically reducing the number and complexity of objects depicted and repeating the same basic forms throughout his career, Morandi sees Cézanne and raises him, reducing the master’s equation to a more condensed and elegant form.