Giorgio Morandi – Natura Morta

In Edmund de Waal’s latest book, An Archive, the celebrated ceramicist and author of The Hare with Amber Eyes, has a chapter in it where he talks about how we can all find ourselves on the edges of still life, how just by picking up and setting down cups and other vessels we can create ‘serendipities, moments of cadence…This world of things is full of small epiphanies.’ He goes on to talk about Giorgio Morandi’s life-long preoccupation with the way that an object, often the same object repeatedly depicted, can change an ambience and / or be changed in the mind of the beholder, just by virtue of its re-positioning or different lighting:

When an object takes dominion, it takes over a space in the world, a space in our visual field and a space in our thinking. This is the paradox about these small paintings of pots and tins, painted in a studio no larger than a box room.

Morandi, like Chardin before him, could take the humblest objects and find in the depiction of their adjacencies, in their size, shape and colour relationships to one another, a resonance that shoutier paintings overlook. Today, we would describe the quiet contemplation of such minimalist work an act of mindfulness. There is an irony in the idea that Morandi made his artworks in a tightly confined space (a bedroom at his home in Bologna) when there exists a psychogenic space within the painting, within and around its colour-circumscribed things, which seems ineffably boundless and infinitely discoverable. These are objects which, straightforwardly, are containers for stuff: liquids, foodstuffs. But containment as an idea is made ambiguous in Morandi’s still lifes. Just as the outer edges of the painting appear to ‘contain’ the objects painted, it is an illusion of volume that we look at. Similarly, each painted object bears an idea of the potential for stuff to be contained within each, but their essence is empty and flat. A bewildering mise en abyme paradox.

However, these still lifes, as exemplified by Natura Morta, are not very still, nor indeed are they ‘morta.’ They seem to thrum with soundless energy. The fluted vase in particular, with its wobbly edges, appears to vibrate the air around it. The brush marks of the dun painted background make what we expect to be solid, pulsate. It is as if a forcefield surrounds these vessels, a magnetic attraction and repulsion charge made visible.

Other strange ideas arise as I contemplate this work. The white vase towers above its neighbours, the flouncy flashiness of its form commanding attention as if egotistically. To use de Waal’s word, it enjoys dominion. It dominates and yet it doesn’t overshadow its fellows literally; the shadows are cast to the right and away with light from the left. The rearmost vessel vies for attention by virtue of its height and apparent volume but cannot compete in terms of luminescence, its outer colour closest to that of the background it sits against. The irregularly topped (broken?) vessel in front of it has had the integrity of its own shape and whiteness compromised yet retains a deserved place in the assembly. The pinkish container between the two white receptacles feels subjugated and yet it holds its ground, its colour distinction lending it a certain individuality while its relatively smaller size speaks of its humility. At the same time, it feels like it holds the other objects within its orbit and that they would fail to relate to one another if it were absented. The objects sit close to one another, but they don’t touch which feels significant. The ramekin in foremost position sits a little apart, as if needing its own space, its separation is like that of a young animal straying a little from the security of the herd.

The artist’s decision to compose his objects and to paint them in these positions feels as it were critical to him but remains a mystery to us. Could they stand as metaphors for the way we as people relate to one another, some dominant, some outliers, some needing company? Their muteness is touching but also painful by this reading. It is entirely possible and most probably likely that these notions are what I have brought to the painting and didn’t necessarily exist in the mind of its creator. But that’s what art does. The act of looking generates ideas so that the artwork is not so much a gift handed down from an imperious artist from on high but invites an act of collaboration between artist and viewer. The same painting might generate entirely different ideas in another viewer and yet will retain a self-referential truth.

It is interesting how non-declamatory art (so different from the art of Morandi’s near contemporary Picasso, for example) seems to open up more space for the viewer, how the quietude of its subject matter can cede authority from creator to onlooker. The subdued chromatism employed by Morandi has been seen by some as cold or at least evincing a want of passion. Others have even perceived in its austerity some of the aesthetics of Italian fascism. While it is true that Morandi expressed some views supportive of Mussolini before the war, I agree with other commentators who have seen this as careerism rather than an expression of a deeply felt ideology. However, it is well-documented that Morandi was influenced by early Renaissance fresco masters such as Piero della Francesca, not in terms of subject matter, but in the calmness and rationality of their composition. He shares the muted emotion that some Renaissance artists embraced together with the simplicity of the pigmented plaster medium and brings a pearly materiality to his art. The things in the painting are made of clay and there is something in the way that the beautiful monotone palette that reminds me of pottery in the making, before firing. The colours seem honest, understated, their ingredients unexotic. They also speak of the facture of the things they depict on the canvas. Colour and object become one and the same: refined earth.

By restricting his palette, Morandi becomes an examiner of subtle modulation and of how textural tonality becomes more and not less consequential. The mood evoked is not to me as reverential as some critics claim. While there may be a degree of expectancy to it, theatricality writ small if you like, I find no sense in which a mysterious rite, an anointment or communion, is suggested, but there does exist an uncanniness to the work. It is as if more ostentatious colour has been leached from the world or our ability to perceive its full spectrum has been impaired, leaving us with a surreal de Chirico-esque domestic landscape where things can only have presence as ghosts of themselves. These objects seem strangely unmoored from the chaos and messiness of the real world so that their physicality is rendered spectral and questionable. So, the painting manifests a tension between the tangible things it displays and the feeling that what we see might be about to dissolve in front of our eyes. These substance holders threaten quiveringly to become the inverse of the idea of containment.

Morandi’s detractors accuse him of a glum sludginess, reigning as ‘the king of beige.’ To them he is an overrated artist of limited ambition and ability, continually worrying at the same subject – a forerunner of minimalism with minimal imagination. But this criticises what is most admirable about his oeuvre. It is their very blankness which unsettles. Where does this perturbation come from? In a Guardian review of a Morandi show a couple of years ago, the always insightful Jonathan Jones described his work as akin to a ‘silent reckoning’ with objects, and I think this phrase, the idea of coming to terms with or confronting the strange thingness in everyday life, captures some of the mystery and troubling anxiety that the artist evokes.