The painter Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) was a man “so reclusive and ascetic” that some referred to him as The Monk, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. “Forever a bachelor”, he spent almost his entire life living and working in a house shared with his mother and sisters in the northern Italian city of Bologna; he slept in the same carefully “ordered atelier” that he painted in.
If Morandi’s biography does not sound terribly exciting, nor do descriptions of his work: for the most part, with “fanatical concentration”, he gave himself over to depicting “a panoply of humdrum domestic objects”, including vases, jugs and sugar bowls, oil lamps, coffee tins, urns, “tapering liquor bottles and carafes”.
Invariably, he rendered these compositions “in a muted, chalky palette mostly of dun, ochre, and rose-beige”. Yet as unpromising as Morandi’s art might sound, his enigmatic still lifes have a transfixingly “meditative” quality that ranks them “among the most memorable images of 20th century Italian art”.
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This show, Masterpieces from the Magnani-Rocca Foundation, brings together an exquisite selection of Morandi works once owned by one of his foremost collectors. Small though it is, this is “a passionate, poetic celebration” of a quietly fascinating artist.
“Morandi made the still life a 20th century art form,” said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. In a work such as his great 1936 Still Life, he ponders “the simultaneous banality and poetry” of objects including a ceramic lemon squeezer, a blue and white bowl, and a white porcelain bottle, all arranged across a “grey, featureless space”. His work is apparently simple yet very mysterious: “a silent reckoning with objects and places”.
Yet Morandi was not oblivious to the wider world: he spent much of his life under Mussolini’s tyranny, and was himself imprisoned in 1943 for his connections to the resistance. It’s hard not to detect the “monstrous shadows” of this period in his wartime work: 1941’s Still Life with Musical Instruments sees the curved body of a lute “crushed under a guitar and trumpet as if they were a heap of corpses”.
Morandi did not limit himself exclusively to still life, said Jackie Wullschläger in the FT. In a 1954 landscape, he captured a view from his studio – yet even here, the tall buildings he sees are “lined up like bottles and vases”, and are “transformed like them into monumental volumes”.
In a rare 1925 self-portrait, he presents himself as being “as enigmatically neutral as his bottles”. Morandi, it’s clear, used painting as a way to make sense of the world. “I believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal, than what we actually see,” he said in 1960.
So much in his art remains open to interpretation, but this fine little show beautifully encapsulates his “particular vision of hard-won serenity”.
Estorick Collection, London N1 (020-7704 9522, estorickcollection.com)
